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 Orkney Islands. Drawn to the sea, it appears that the grandmother and mother both drowned accidentally, and their unfolding dramas overlap with restrained pathos. Tait's first feature, this film was made when she was 74.

When a new landlord comes around, Mr. and Mrs. Choi find their dry cleaning business, Happy Cleaners in Flushing, Queens, in jeopardy of closing after 17 years. While they make every effort to save the business, their daughter Hyunny and son Kevin are also at their own tough crossroads of life under the pressure of their parents’ high hopes. Struggling through economic turmoil, cultural clashes, …

A love story spanning two continents, NOWHERE IN AFRICA is the extraordinary true tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya. Abandoning their once-comfortable existence in Germany, Walter Redlich, his wife Jettel (Juliane Köhler, of AIMÉE & JAGUAR) and their five-year-old daughter Regina each deal with the harsh realities of their new life in different …

Each year, the slow-paced lifestyle on Mexico’s largest desert in Baja Peninsula is given a turbo boost by the Baja 1000, the largest off-road motorsport race in the world that takes place crossing the Mexican-US border. In this modern-day western, José Permar tells a unique story about the border, complete with a commissioned soundtrack of epic corridos performed by a trio of colorful musicians. …

In 1943, while the Allies are bombing Berlin and the Gestapo is purging the capital of Jews, a dangerous love affair blossoms between two women. One of them, Lilly Wust (NOWHERE IN AFRICA’s Juliane Köhler), married and the mother of four sons, enjoys the privileges of her stature as an exemplar of Nazi motherhood. For her, this affair will be the most decisive experience of her life. For the other …

In post-WWII Leningrad, two women, Iya and Masha (astonishing newcomers Viktoria Miroshnichenko and Vasilisa Perelygina), intensely bonded after fighting side by side as anti-aircraft gunners, attempt to readjust to a haunted world. As the film begins, Iya, long and slender and towering over everyone—hence the film’s title—works as a nurse in a shell-shocked hospital, presiding over traumatized …

A provocative and raw exploration of female sexuality, director Malgoska Szumowska's ELLES paints an unromantic picture of upper-crust domesticity refracted through the vibrant eroticism of prostitution. Vacillating between opposing worlds defined alternatively by sexual freedom and constraint, ELLES stars the fearless Juliette Binoche (Chocolat) as Anne, a well-off Parisian journalist investigating …

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 employees Claude Goretta and Alain Tanner (later to become established art-house filmmakers back home) were inspired by their colleagues’ success with the Free Cinema programme to …

In 1937, tens of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent were exterminated by the Dominican army, on the basis of anti-black racism. Fast-forward to 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents, retroactive to 1929, rendering more than 200,000 people stateless. Elena has lost her citizenship due to this ruling, and her family …

My Bolivia is a historic road trip to make sense of a family’s and a country’s past. A Latino filmmaker travels to Bolivia to find the things his parents told him, and what they never said — the family’s slave-owning past, his grandfather the President’s role in Latin America’s bloodiest war, the relative who was one of the leaders of the Revolution, and connections with a notorious Nazi …

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 seen in the street market, the food shops and the synagogue. The soundtrack plays a key part in the film as Yiddish songs are interspersed with snatches of conversation … More

Impressions of a typical Saturday at Blackburn, a milling town in the North of England.

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 by unruly children, sparse bedsits and harsh realities. With its minimal dialogue and focus on the everyday … More

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 … More

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, if not tawdry, attractions on offer. Originally made on a tiny budget in 1953, Anderson made the … More

Food for a Blush is a documentary of worry, satirising some aspects of London life.

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 Railways’ changeover from steam to diesel, the film explores their sense of loss and frustration with poetry and compassion, but shorn of sentimentality. Completed … More

NEW RESTORATION! Set against the backdrop of the beautiful Mediterranean, Swept Away is Lina Wertmuller's most famous and controversial film about sex, love and politics. On an elegant yacht cruising off the coast of Sardinia, Raffaella (Mariangela Melato), a rich and stunning capitalist, enjoys tormenting Gennarino (Giancarlo Giannini), a Communist sailor. Fate weaves a different scenario and roles … More

THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI is a raucous sex comedy that brought international fame to director Lina Wertmuller (Swept Away). Giancarlo Giannini (Love and Anarchy) gives a wonderfully comic performance as the sad sack Mimi, a Sicilian laborer whose refusal to vote for the Mafia's candidate leads him to lose his job, his wife and his home. At rock bottom, he revives his spirits by falling in love with the … More

Bi Gan follows up his knockout debut, Kaili Blues, with this noir-tinged stunner about a lost soul (Jue Huang) on a quest to find a missing woman from his past (Wei Tang, Lust, Caution). Following leads across Guizhou province, he crosses paths with a series of colorful characters, among them a prickly hairdresser played by Taiwanese superstar Sylvia Chang. When the search leads him to a dingy movie … More