AN ESSAY film is not quite a documentary, though it often looks like one. It is almost never fiction, though it might dip its feet into fictional waters. It is not simply an art film, though it may sit as comfortably in a gallery as a cinema.

This may sound confusing, if not daunting, but Andrea Bussmann’s Fausto at the Essay Film Festival explores folklore in a small town on Mexico’s Oaxacan coast and demonstrates how exciting and engaging such films can be.

Though indebted to the documentary genre, the film takes some cues from horror, as in the compellingly spooky opening in which a local resident, half-lit by a campfire, recounts the story of a cursed house in town.

Bussmann uses this and other local legends to explore the effects of centuries of exploitation on the  land, communities and culture of the region and, within it, finds room for moments of astounding beauty through sensitive photography and poetic narration.

Elsewhere, events in the festival blurred the lines not just between film genres but the discourse around them. Dora Garcia’s The Joycean Society is about a Zurich-based book group which has been reading James Joyce’s Finnegan's Wake repeatedly for the past 33 years.

The screening was bookended by a reading group and a Q&A with leading Joycean academics. Their contexts proved to be necessary, as The Joycean Society leans further toward the inscrutable end of the essay-film spectrum, perhaps appropriately given the subject matter.

No Dance, No Palaver, a triptych of short films by Onyeka Igwe, recontextualises footage created by the profoundly problematic Colonial Film Unit (CFU). Combining archive with contemporary dance footage, Igwe subverts the dogmatic film-making rules of the CFU and interrogates the images with her own questions relating to the colonial gaze.

Like the Joycean Society, these three films were accompanied with an engrossing introduction by the director concerning her research into the anti-colonial uprising of the 1929 Aba women’s war in Nigeria.

While an essay film festival may sound as exclusive as a Swiss-Joycean reading group, the diverse subject matter and original approaches to cinema were in the best tradition of the avant-garde in introducing new and exciting work.

On top of this, over half of the films were screened free of charge. Roll on next year.