By Neil Giordano

Want to see some excellent new films? How about in pairs?

The Independent Film Festival Boston starts this week with a broad sampling of outstanding features and shorts, some already acclaimed from the festival circuit, as well as a number from local and regional filmmakers. Here are a few selections — linked by theme

A scene from Daughters.

The relationship between fathers and daughters are examined in a number of films on offer. Good One (May 3, at the Brattle Theatre) is the debut film of writer-director India Donaldson and it arrives with critical raves. Teenager Sam accompanies her dad and his friend on a camping trip in the Catskills only to find herself forced into a caretaker role she resents. The film explores the period when adolescents begin to understand their parents as people — sometimes they aren’t sure they like what they see. A much different father-daughter story unfolds in the documentary Daughters (May 5, at the Somerville Theatre). Here, we see four girls as they prepare for a daddy-daughter dance: the dramatic twist is that their fathers are all incarcerated in a Washington DC jail, which has organized the dance. Filmed over the span of eight years, we see how the bonds between parents and children evolve as they grow to learn more about each other. The revealing result is a tenuous but redemptive arc. This one is a tearjerker — bring some Kleenex.

A scene from Evil Sublet.

Can’t find an apartment in today’s crazy housing market? Micro-budget horror-comedy Evil Sublet (May 4, at the Somerville Theatre) takes up the crusade for affordable housing by way of a zany, New York-flavored stew that includes chunks of the macabre and satires of pharmaceutical-ad voice overs. A married couple comes across a too-good-to-be-true sublet in the East Village ( eVil, you see) only to find it is possessed by demons and ghosts garnered over a century of stabbings, drownings, stairway accidents, and peanut allergies. But it’s only $2,000 a month? Staten Island would be worse. Did I mention there’s a musical interlude? Closer to Boston, the fascinating documentary Secret Mall Apartment (May 5, at the Somerville Theatre) takes a more indirect and sinuous approach to the housing problem in its story of a group of artists who built and lived in a makeshift apartment in an overlooked crevice of the Providence Place mall in the mid-2000s. The film also explores the place of art and artists in today’s society, given that the man at the  center of the project, Michael Townsend (who will appear at the IFFB screening), built the space as a living art installation, a satiric commentary on the forces of gentrification and commodification personified by the mall itself.

Colman Domingo in a scene from Sing Sing.

The theater arts play prominently in a duo of narrative films. The festival’s opening night entry, Ghostlight (May 1, at the Somerville Theatre) is about how the stage can shape. A grief-stricken construction worker joins a community theater production of Romeo and Juliet. He is accepted into this new community, which leads him to contemplate the events that led him to the footlights. Co-directed by Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson (who wrote and directed 2019’s Saint Frances), this is a heartbreaking film with a light comic touch. Dolly De Leon (from last year’s Triangle of Sadness) is among the cast. Sing Sing (May 7 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre) is based on a true story and stars Colman Domingo, most recently praised for his turns in The Color Purple and Rustin. Here Domingo plays an unofficial leader of a group of incarcerated men who collaborate together in the eponymous prison’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program to produce and act in their own stage projects. Many in the cast are actual RTA alumni, including co-star Clarince Maclin (who plays himself). The film’s storyline is based, in part, on an Esquire magazine article and an original play performed at Sing Sing in 2005.

Neil Giordano teaches film and creative writing in Newton. His work as an editor, writer, and photographer has appeared in Harper’s, Newsday, Literal Mind, and other publications. Giordano previously was on the original editorial staff of DoubleTake magazine and taught at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.