For the last two years, the New York Film Festival came complete with a ready-made Molotov cocktail in the form of a Lars von Trier film, suitable for hurling at your dinner companions. As this year’s festival enters its second week, headlined by the centerpiece film “Volver” from the exhaustingly beloved Pedro Almodóvar, there’s no easy political-historical flashpoint like “Dogville” or “Manderlay.”

But this year’s filmmakers are far from aloof, tackling well-established economic and religious legacies of the past with a firmness of purpose distinct from facile provocation.

Abderrahmane Sissako’s “Bamako,” for example, puts the financial sorcery of the World Bank and the IMF literally on trial — in the courtyard of a bustling African village. Mr. Sissako’s concept cuts his subject down to size amid daily life and matter-of-fact folk, even while treating an enormous, tortuous legacy. Premised on a juxtaposition that might have been a prank in a Godard film, the film instead builds to one of the festival’s most cathartic finales through speeches and song.

“Bamako” has come and gone, though happily news of distribution preceded the preview screenings. But its hard look at people and nations at points of crisis is shared by other filmmakers with similarly thoughtful formal approaches. If, like most mortals, you’ve been shut out of the narrative magicking of David Lynch’s “Inland Empire” (or Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Syndromes and a Century”), you have recourse at least to an armload of grounded dramas and docs.

In a free country, Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s “Offside” might be a goofy caper; the plight of its young female soccer fans caught sneaking into a stadium on game day is amply cushioned by comedy. But as usual, Mr. Panahi molds visual corollaries to the unforgiving gender strictures of Iranian society. There’s a gathering absurdity to their being penned up like sheep just out of sight of the match, which is heard but never shown.

“Offside” is a far more circumscribed work than Mr. Panahi’s last film about women, “The Circle”, or his subtle look at class conflict, “Crimson Gold.” But he works nimbly with a little galley of character types, especially a sarcastic butch girl and a nervous, soft-hearted guard from a rural village. And invoking the international stage through a World Cup qualifier deftly spotlights how some Iranian traditions are less than ready for prime time.

On the other side of the globe — and 80 years ago — age-old customs come under threat in Zacharias Kunuk’s autumnal follow-up to the pioneering “Atanarjuat.” “The Journals of Knud Rasmussen” boldly casts aside mythic scale and drive for the meandering, reticent drama of a shaman and his family caught in the creep of Christianity. Rasmussen, who was an Inuit-speaking Danish protoanthropologist of the 1920s whose writings filled volumes, is the family’s affable companion and, with us, observer of their habits and trials.

Mr. Kunuk has sometimes marshaled too unaffected actors and a dilatory narrative, but he achieves a mood of loss that settles like an overnight snowfall. The indelible edge-of-the-earth landscape they traverse comes to feel as claustrophobic as their igloo, tinged by physical and spiritual struggles and broken up only by the odd cursed dream and bursts of good humor. After meeting a cohort of Jesus-praising, hymn-singing countrymen, the family reaches, with a finely tuned mix of resignation and fortitude, the end of one history and the beginning of the unknown.

Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s “Our Daily Bread,” a documentary exploring how the food we eat is harvested, slaughtered, quartered, and packaged teleports us to an efficiently whirring future of conveyor belts, robotic knives, and tarped-over countryside. But the future is, as they say, now: Mr. Geyrhalter’s stunning documentary is a near wordless tour of hypermodern farms and slaughterhouses that feed Europe. The director once journeyed into Chernobyl’s post-meltdown badlands and ghost towns to see who or what was living there (“Pripyat,” a 1999 festival selection), and here he brings us just as unreal a reality, a clockwork chronicle that confronts us with the terrible beauty of our modernized civilization.

You’ll learn that thousands of chicks can be poured and diverted on those conveyor belts like a peeping river, that the gutting of cows can be automated, and, rather more comically, how olive trees are harvested. Mr. Geyrhalter’s measured takes avoid polemic, framing his material with neatly squared-off compositions and using tracking shots reminiscent of the machines on view that render jump-suited workers just another kind of sprocket.

“Our Daily Bread” isn’t meant to scare the squeamish with a Franco-German “Fast Food Nation” — these places are far too clean for that (though there is some blood and guts). The film instead moves us along from fascination, to a kind of spectatorial automation, and finally to a visceral but almost existential feeling of numbness. This soulless world of pure function lays bare the industry behind reality, take it or leave it, and though everything works perfectly, it’s still a film that makes you hope karma doesn’t exist.

Beyond the weekend, the festival’s other world-political offerings include two suitable companions to “Offside”: the highly praised Egyptian documentary “These Girls,” about teenage street girls scrabbling at the margins of Cairo society; and the revival of “Insiang,” a wrenching 1976 melodrama by Philippine director Lino Brocka that tightens the vise of urban poverty and macho folly on a young woman. Together, the two films underline some globally common tendencies of human behavior and social extremity one could well do without.