In this compelling new film, Werner Herzog’s extraordinary life and work are brought into focus through clips from his finest films and interviews with those who know him best. This fascinating and insightful documentary explores the career of the auteur director, writer and poet, whose adventu...

Robinson in Space again finds Patrick Keller pushing the limits of British cinema to fascinating degrees with a rewarding and unparalleled pay-off. Robinson and his unseen companion, a narrator voiced by Paul Scofield, have been commissioned to investigate the 'problem' of England. The journey ta...

Italian director Lorenza Mazzetti borrowed techniques from the neorealist school to conjure this striking study of East End life, one of the original Free Cinema shorts. Following the ambling existence of two deaf-mute dock workers, Mazzetti crafts a poetic depiction of post-war London populated ...

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 working-c...

A special commission as part of the 100 years of Stainless Steel celebrations, The Big Melt is a feature-length elegy to the men and women who toiled in Sheffield's steelworks and a hymn to Britain's proud industrial past. Working together, Sheffield's own musical hero Jarvis Cocker and acclaimed...

Before she hit the big time with Bend it Like Beckham, Gurinder Chadha made this fascinating documentary on what it meant to be a young British Asian in the 1980s. The young people interviewed are from across the UK; the common thread is that they see it as home, but their differing views about w...

The first in Patrick Keiller’s highly imaginative trilogy of psycho-geographic journeys charts a trip through (and history of) London, as undertaken by our unseen narrator (Paul Scofield) and his companion, Robinson.

This fascinating and moving film by award-winning director Penny Woolcock is a lyrical portrait of Britain's coastline, created through an exquisite combination of evocative archive footage - drawn from the BFI National Archive - and stirring music. Brighton-based band British Sea Power set the c...

Independent Welsh filmmaker Karl Francis uses amateur and professional actors to explore the community impact of the 1975 closure of the Ogilvie Colliery in the Rhymney Valley, a few miles from his family home. Critical of the National Coal Board and the trade unions, the film focuses on the frac...

Newly released from prison Robinson has been haunting the Oxfordshire countryside with a cine camera. Film cans and a notebook are later discovered. Shot during the 2008 financial crisis, this film-essay is a fictional account of a real project. Inspired by the work of Karl Polanyi, the film unse...

About half a mile from Heathrow Airport is Harmondsworth detention centre where the visitors in Ben Lewin’s 1976 film are unceremoniously dumped while government officials ponder British immigration laws. The visitors mostly come from India, Pakistan, and Cyprus and are treated like criminals.

Documentary, public information film, morale booster; propaganda film. All descriptions that apply to Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister's extraordinary war-time film. Using his customary combination of poetry and propaganda, Jennings constructs a collage of the various people and classes ...

Humphrey Jennings and Harry Watt's famous film, produced at the GPO film unit, is an enduring example of British self-mythology and rousing evidence of the artistic potential of supposed propaganda. A hymn to our capital city's resilience during the Blitz, structured as a day-in-the-life of stiff...

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) ingenio...

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 danci...

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.

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 modest, i...