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 Franco Rosso • Documentary • 1985 • 92 minutes
In this compelling and thought-provoking documentary, sports writer and novelist Gordon Williams uses archive footage, as well as interviews with family members and friends, to investigate the troubled life of the mixed-race British boxi...
Directed by Andrea Weiss • Documentary • With Ian McKellen • 1996 • 74 minutes
Billed as 'a kind of post-modern queer soap opera for Britain', Andrea Weiss' documentary tells a sharp story. She evaluates the way gay and lesbian people have been depicted in mainstream British film and television....
Directed by Not credited • Documentary • With Prince Philip • 1957 • 12 minutes
Please note that this film contains disturbing scenes of animal cruelty.
In the late 1956 the Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh went on a tour of Antarctica and the South Atlantic, which included visits to Graham Land...
Directed by Not credited • Documentary • With Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew • 1961 • 19 minutes
This compilation of newsreels sponsored by the Commonwealth Relations Office and the Central Office of Information, portrays the royal children at a young age. The f...
Directed by Not credited • Documentary • With Queen Elizabeth II • 1960 • 16 minutes
Compilation newsreel portraying Queen Elizabeth II from her childhood to the early days of her reign, sponsored by the Central Office of Information. This film starts with early footage of the Queen as a girl an...
Directed by Humphrey Jennings • Documentary • 1946 • 38 minutes
A diary for the first six months in the life of a baby born 3rd September 1944, illustrating events and daily life during this period of the war. Directed by Humphrey Jennings.
Directed by Humphrey Jennings • Documentary • 1943 • 63 minutes
A dramatisation of the work of the National Fire Service during the Fire Blitz of the winter and spring of 1940/41.
Directed by Humphrey Jennings, Harry Watt & Pat Jackson • Documentary • 1939 • 23 minutes
Sunday 3 September, 1939. The day begins peacefully with people going to church or to the country, but at 11.15am Neville Chamberlain broadcasts from 10 Downing Street the news that Britain has declared war...
Directed by Humphrey Jennings & Stewart McAllister • Documentary • 1942 • 19 minutes
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 p...
Directed by Humphrey Jennings & Harry Watt • Documentary • 1940 • 10 minutes
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 the Britis...
Directed by Harry Watt & Basil Charles Wright • Documentary • 1936 • 23 minutes
A cornerstone of British documentary, Harry Watt and Basil Wright's NIGHT MAIL, with music by Benjamin Britten and verse by W.H. Auden, stands as a beacon for John Grierson's original purpose for documentary - to mak...
Directed by Humphrey Jennings • Documentary • 1943 • 36 minutes
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 (o...
Directed by Miguel Pereira • Drama • With Leopoldo Aban, Juan José Camero, Guillermo Delgado • 1987 • 96 minutes
Miguel Pereira’s first feature is a profound and moving tale of a young shepherd boy growing up in a remote village in the Argentinian mountains. The film traces his life via his frie...
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 George Hoellering • Drama • With Leo McKern, T.S. Eliot • 1952 • 114 minutes
George Hoellering’s powerful adaptation of T.S. Eliot's classic verse drama is a stark and highly atypical example of British historical cinema. Little-seen despite winning a top prize at the Venice Film Fes...
