The BFI is the UK’s lead organization for film, television and the moving image. It is a cultural charity that restores and distributes films across the globe. It cares for the BFI National Archive, one of the most significant film and television archive in the world.
Directed by Margaret Tait • Drama • With Celia Imrie, Jack Shepherd, Gerda Stevenson, James Fleet • 1992 • 84 minutes
Margaret Tait's tale of three generations of women in a Scottish family swirls out through a series of interlinking stories and recollections, taking place in Edinburgh and the O...
Directed by Ian Fordyce • Drama • With Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Marty Feldman, Barry Cryer, Aimi MacDonald • 1967 • 24 minutes
The very first show, which survived in David Frost’s personal archive, still manages to astonish as a bold new departure in television comedy. J...
Directed by Michael Grigsby • Documentary • 1962 • 18 minutes
Impressions of a typical Saturday at Blackburn, a milling town in the North of England.
Directed by Lindsay Anderson • Documentary • 1953 • 11 minutes
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...
Directed by Robert Vas • Documentary • 1959 • 27 minutes
Director Robert Vas was himself a refugee from Hungary, having arrived in London only three years earlier when he received a grant from the BFI to make the film. Despite its slightly incongruous use of voiceover, the film was adopted by th...
Directed by Michael Grigsby • Documentary • 1959 • 21 minutes
Produced just in time to be screened under the banner of the late–1950s ‘Free Cinema’ documentary movement, Enginemen records the life and work of engine workers in a locomotive shed just outside Manchester. At the time of British Rai...
Directed by Claude Goretta & Alain Tanner • Documentary • 1957 • 16 minutes
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.
Swiss film enthusiasts and BFI ...
Directed by Elizabeth Russell • Documentary • 1959 • 29 minutes
Food for a Blush is a documentary of worry, satirising some aspects of London life.
Directed by Robert Vas • Documentary • 1962 • 20 minutes
This classic documentary by Robert Vas depicts the way of life in an east London Jewish community on Hessel Street, Whitechapel. Its back-to-back houses and small shops are about to be replaced by high-rise flats. The thriving community is...
Directed by Lorenza Mazzetti • Documentary • 1956 • 52 minutes
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, ...
Directed by Ron Peck • Documentary • 1981 • 47 minutes
A study of the 20th century American painter's life and work.
Directed by Andrew Piddington • Documentary • With David Driskell • 1991 • 52 minutes
David Driskell, the pathbreaking art history professor and artist, is the focus of HIDDEN HERITAGE: THE ROOTS OF BLACK AMERICAN PAINTING. He made it his life mission to trace the work of Black artists from the ...
Directed by Michael Gill • Documentary • 1967 • 14 minutes
The artist at work in his studio shows artist Giacometti drawing and modelling in his studio in Paris.
Directed by Edward Bennett • Drama • With Julie Covington, Ian Charleson • 1982 • 92 minutes
Set in Ireland in 1920, Ascendancy is a powerful meditation on English guilt over the tormented history of Northern Ireland. Connie (Julie Covington) is an English aristocrat driven to despair over the h...
Directed by Pat Murphy & John Davies • Drama • With Mary Jackson • 1981 • 90 minutes
Pat Murphy and John Davis’ experimental film attempts to posit an alternative, feminist perspective on the Troubles and Irish nationalism. Flitting between the various pasts and present, it follows the experienc...
Directed by Anne-Marie Miéville & Jean-Luc Godard • Documentary • With Michel Piccoli • 1995 • 50 minutes
Jean-Luc Godard produced this ambitious project, directed by his wife, Anne-Marie Miéville. Travelling around six regions (each of which featured in a classic film) he interviews young local...
Directed by Nagisa Oshima • Documentary • With William B. White, Nagisa Oshima • 1996 • 52 minutes
The forces and themes that have shaped his nation's cinema drive Nagisa Oshima's forceful and erudite essay. Based entirely on archive footage, it considers the rediscovery of Daisuke Ito's Chuji's...
Directed by George Miller • Documentary • With George Miller • 1996 • 65 minutes
Mad Max director George Miller explores the tradition of film production in Australia, forging a link between the imported technology of filmmaking and the ancient Aboriginal creation myths. In parallel with tracing...
Directed by Keith Griffiths • Documentary • With Stan Brakhage, William Moritz, John Whitney, Michael Scroggins, Jules Engel • 1993 • 51 minutes
Exploration of the work of pioneers in abstract cinema using rare archive film, film clips and interviews to demonstrate the influence of the early cin...
Directed by Victor Schonfeld & Myriam Alaux • Documentary • With Julie Christie, Richard Ryder, Roger Ulrich, Lord Houghton, Peter Singer • 1981 • 136 minutes
Documentary about the abuse of animals in factory farming, sport and research. Made over a period of two years in Britain and the U.S., i...
Directed by Sandhyu Suri • Documentary • 2018 • 72 minutes
Award-winning filmmaker Sandhya Suri (I for India) skillfully weaves together archival footage—including hand colored sequences—with a new score by composer Soumik Datta to create an emotionally resonant story about life across India fro...
Directed by Nelson Pereira Dos Santos • Documentary • With Raul Cortez, André Barros, Christiane Torloni, Patrick Tannus, Cosme Alves Neto • 1995 • 95 minutes
Personal view of the Latin American cinema by Brazilian director Nelson Pereira dos Santos, based on an adaptation of a novel by Silvia O...
Directed by Hans Richter • Drama • With Jack Bittner, Werner Brandes, Norma Cazanjian, Lauren Denny, Joseph Freeman • 1948 • 81 minutes
Joe, a young man down on his luck, discovers he has the power to create dreams, and sets up a business selling them to others. The 'dreams' he gives to his clie...
