Refuge England
British Film Institute • 25m
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 the Free Cinema movement for its stylistic contrast of contradictory images and sound and its focus on the dispossessed.
With its enquiry into themes that are just as resonant in today’s society, and its uncompromising outsider’s view of an inhospitable 1950s London, Refuge England is a fascinating example of Free Cinema. Director Vas went on to become a very important documentary maker at the BBC.
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Enginemen
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...
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Nice Time
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.
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Food for a Blush
Directed by Elizabeth Russell • Documentary • 1959 • 29 minutes
Food for a Blush is a documentary of worry, satirising some aspects of London life.
