The pressures of competition are compounded by the trials of growing up in these striking portraits of young women athletes striving to meet the high standards that have been set for them. With affecting restraint, rising director Qiu Yang (who previously won the Short Film Palme d’Or at Cannes for A GENTLE NIGHT) depicts the enormous emotional weight a student bears as she tries desperately to quit her school dance team in SHE RUNS. Then, Mariel Hemingway delivers a star-making performance as a striving, Olympic-hopeful hurdler who finds love with a fellow female athlete in Robert Towne’s PERSONAL BEST, both a groundbreaking queer romance and a bracingly visceral study of the human body in motion.