Contemporary films from Italy seem overshadowed by other European cinemas. Fellini, Antonioni, and Wertmüller became household names for American moviegoers in the 1960s and ’70s, shorthand for whole sensibilities and ways of perceiving the world. But in 2008, even astute, English-speaking cineastes might have a hard time naming three notable Italian filmmakers whose careers began in the last decade.

“Best of Youth: New Italian Cinema,” a succinct, eight-film survey beginning tomorrow at BAM’s cinématek, attempts to correct the situation. The week-long series collects prize-winning films from the past eight years that also happen to be directorial debuts. The features cover territory both predictable and novel, and include neo-Neo-Realist exercises, crime capers, a midlife meltdown drama, and a coming-of-age story that mimics the Hollywood drag-race smash “The Fast and the Furious.”

Not unexpectedly, the sweep of these works connects the abiding binaries of Italian cinema: the country and the city, the south and the north, the rustic and the sophisticated.

Salvatore Mereu’s “Three Step Dancing” (2003) embraces the rural tableaux of two of Italy’s greatest directors, the Taviani brothers, in a seasonal sequence of four vignettes set in Sardinia. The rough poetry of the natural landscape is beautifully evoked, as the camera traces such elemental moments as a gang of peasant children splashing in the sea for the first time, and a lonely shepherd’s unlikely encounter with a beautiful French girl who has piloted her tiny plane to his village, as if for the single purpose of seducing him on the shore of a rock-enclosed swimming hole.

That latter scene implies the clichéd abandon of a romance novel — or, skipping across the dial from the Tavianis’ earthy earnestness to chic satire, the class-defying romance of Lina Wertmüller’s “Swept Away.” But the characters sparkle with surprise. The young woman (Caroline Ducey) speaks only an excitable, breathless French. The speechless, virginal shepherd (Michele Carboni) becomes aroused only if he can make love from a certain position — one more common to, er, sheep. It’s all framed with an air of quiet observance, asking the viewer to look deeper into each moment.

That penetrating stillness becomes unbearably intense in Paolo Franchi’s “The Spectator” (2004). Set in Turin and Rome, this film appears to be a brooding, psychological study in obsession and unrequited desire, but it becomes more complex and enigmatic even as it proceeds to a kind of fulfillment. The Czech-born actress Barbora Bobulova is a darkly pretty but introverted young translator named Valeria who grows fixated with the neighbor she spies through her apartment window: Massimo (Andrea Renzi), a middle-aged professor who spends his nights much as she does, alone at his desk, parsing some unspoken sadness.

Without quite knowing what she’s doing, Valeria gradually becomes a stalker and, through a series of circumstances, finds herself following Massimo to his new life in Rome. There, trailing Massimo to his offices at the university, she spies him with another woman (Brigitte Catillon), and immediately contrives to connect with her by feigning an accident. Ms. Cotillon’s Flavia is also an academic, trying to finish a book about her late husband. Valeria’s vulnerability, and her facility with language, soon win her friendship with Flavia, who hires her to assist with the book.

The scenario is full of subtle shifts of balance. The actors all play intuitively to deep interior motives, and unlike the typical love triangle, this one skews toward mutually thwarted desire rather than a dramatic rupture. Soon enough, it’s Massimo who is obsessed with Valeria, frustrated that Flavia cannot give up her dead husband’s memory and move forward.

Mr. Franchi marshals some impressively patient camerawork, set to a disquieting chamber-music score that situates the action at an often voyeuristic remove. Only very little things happen to move the story along, and they happen very slowly, but the actors manage to embed so much mystery inside their silences that the plot arc feels much more dramatic than it really is. It’s a very cerebral kind of tension, which perhaps makes it more effective than anything more visceral.

Through April 20 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).