This lively Free Cinema short captures a night out at the Wood Green Jazz Club, where teenagers jive to trad jazz. Funded by the BFI Experimental Film Fund, it was filmed over the course of nine Saturdays by Karel Reisz, then programmer of the National Film Theatre, and a young BBC television dir...

The swirling neon frenzy of Piccadilly Circus has never been better captured than in this innovative short, which presents the London landmark as a bewildering collage of image and sound.

The flagship of the GPO Film Unit's output and a cornerstone of British documentary. Harry Watt and Basil Wright's study of the down postal express stands as a beacon for John Grierson's original purpose for documentary - to make the working man the hero of the screen. A truly collaborative effor...

Lindsay Anderson’s 12–minute tour of Margate’s Dreamland funfair is immediately notable for its deliberately bleak and unattractive photography and a spare and impressionistic soundtrack. Despite the absence of a commentary, the film distinctly conveys Anderson’s obvious disdain for the m...

European emigre Tanya moves to London to work as a family au pair. Still grieving for her recently deceased father and rejected by an old girlfriend, Tanya draws closer to her employer's husband. The sights and sounds of the Capital at Christmas form a deceptively romantic backdrop for this bri...

Filmed at the time Hockney was painting Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, Portrait of David Hockney is made up of a limited number of shots, observing the periphery details of his flat and studio. Each view is held so as to focus on its particular qualities and composition and, with the accompanying so...

A beautiful tale of love, loss, new beginnings and the strange adventure taken by migrants to the UK. In 1977, young Xiao Mei leaves China for the UK to enter into an arranged marriage. Speaking no English and feeling distant from her Elvis-obsessed new husband and his stern mother, Xiao Mei drea...

Humphrey Jennings epitomises the artist-filmmaker and this poetic evocation of ordinary people enjoying well-earned time away from the mill, mine, or foundry is a forerunner to Jennings’ later wartime greats such as Listen to Britain. Joyous shots of people either pigeon fancying, ballroom dan...

An early classic of Black British cinema about the intriguing social dynamics that arise as a ten shilling note is passed around the black community. A student borrows ten bob from a white man and then in turn lends it to a natty musician. Later, when the student meets an upstanding member of the...

In his first cinema film, made at British Transport Films, John Schlesinger presents a day in the life of Waterloo rail station. Now a staple television format, this observational look at the workings of one of London’s key railway hubs was considered innovative in 1961, winning it awards at Ve...

This autobiographical narrative redefines female beauty and sexuality by reflecting on filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah's relationship with her mother. Onwurah's discovery of her sexual appeal as a young model is combined with an intimate account of her mother Madge's experience of desexualisation after h...

This short film is one of Samantha Morton’s earliest screen credits, telling the story of a pair of latter-day Bonnie and Clydes who, after a heist, head out to the Fens to score some drugs. There they find their dealer friend shot and bleeding, and reluctantly they have to deal with the situatio...

If Edward Lear had been alive in the 60s, he may well have made The Peaches, Britain's short film entry at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival. A very beautiful, very clever girl (played by future Adam Adamant Lives! star Juliet Harmer) adores peaches, but when she falls in love the world's supply star...

The villagers of Cwmgiedd, southwest Wales, are the stars of Humphrey Jennings’ unforgettably inventive drama-doc. At Lidice, Czechoslovakia, a mining community’s entire male population was executed by the Nazis in 1942. Jennings (often said to be Britain’s greatest documentary filmmaker) i...

Karel Reisz’s honest and sympathetic depiction of South London teens aimed to challenge the media perception of ‘Teddy Boys’, and would be one of the last films to appear under the Free Cinema banner. One of the key elements of the Free Cinema films was the sympathetic representation of wor...

Masie Blue is an enigmatic Black Widow figure under investigation by detective Margrave for her involvement in the suicides of successful white men. Through the blurred lines of perception and reality, the myth of the black feminine mystique is explored under the guise of a murder mystery. Writte...

The 1970s, and a suburban family depart for their summer holiday. But as tensions rise and tempers fray, a terrible accident sees their cosy world disintegrate. Director Andrew Kötting (Gallivant, Swandown) and co-writer Sean Lock inject real terror into the everyday nightmare of a family vacatio...