A continuing series spotlighting new films that expand the possibilities of the medium and provide a vision for its future.

An ongoing series presenting rare films from the ICA Archive, screening on original 35mm and 16mm prints.

A continuing series of in-depth retrospectives exploring the work of cinema's great artists, both past and present.

Johan Grimonprez’s film essay, anchored by the rhythm of American jazz, reveals disturbing truths about the decolonial struggle between global political powers.

Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s stunning sophomore feature – which follows ICA Distribution project A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) – is a profound meditation on urban migration and dislocation.

As the 2021 UK national lockdown drags on, increasingly isolated theatre actors Sam and Mark spend their days in the online world of Grand Theft Auto. When they have an idea to stage a full production of Hamlet within the game.

Using never-seen-before interrogation footage, this investigation of Benjamin Netanyahu and his inner circle provides an unflinching gaze into the private world behind the headlines. 

Winner of the Cannes Special Palme d’Or, Jean-Luc Godard's final feature film is a bracing, beautiful and confrontational essay film interrogating our relationship with film, culture and global politics.

An eight-part video project, whose genesis can be traced both to the great Henri Langlois and a series of lectures Godard gave at Concordia University in 1978, Histoires(s) du cinéma, is both a monumental treatise on cinema as a medium, industry and art form and a profoundly moving examination of the century it defined.

In many ways both the beginning and the apotheosis of Godard's collage films, this sprawling essayistic voyage through the twentieth century serves as both a testament and indictment of the medium that defined it.

A second chance to explore a selection of South Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo's work, from our recent major retrospective.

A special programme of three films celebrating the work of American filmmaker Whit Stillman.

A man quits work to care for dying grandmother, motivated by her wealth, scheming to win her favour before she dies.

Nickel Boys tells the story of Elwood Curtis, a young African-American boy sent to the Nickel Academy after he is falsely accused of a crime. There he meets Turner, and the two form a close friendship trying to survive the horrors of the school.

Whit Stillman’s dryly comic drama about a group of young professionals experiencing life and love while frequenting a Studio 54-esque disco in Manhattan in the early 80s. 

The latest film from Magnus von Horn is a dark fairy tale about one woman’s search for tenderness and morality in a cruel world.

The latest film from Victor Kossakovsky (Gunda, Aquarela) is an epic, intimate, and poetic meditation on architecture and how the design and construction of buildings from the ancient past reveal our destruction — and offer hope for survival and a way forward. 

Made on discarded film stock and released in 1997, the year of Hong Kong’s handover, Made in Hong Kong by Fruit Chan follows alienated youth trapped in cycles of violence.

A double-bill screening programmed by the Machine That Kills Bad People featuring Mitchell's Death and The Cannibals.

Recipient of the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize winner at Venice Film Festival this year, the film is a richly compassionate, emotional and detailed drama of family secrets in the wartime Italian countryside.

A film and installation project by artist, filmmaker, and writer Arjuna Neuman and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva. Filmed in the Atacama desert it explores the entanglements and overlaps of historical events, past present and future, in this site. 

With its annual celebration of emerging filmmakers and the art of short filmmaking, the London Short Film Festival (LSFF) returns for its 22nd edition, taking place 17th - 26th January 2025 across London’s most iconic screens and venues, alongside arts and community spaces and a community-hopping mobile cinema bus.

Following their well-received improvised live film score to Häxan last year, INVITATION TO LOVE (Laura Groves, Fran Lobo, Hopping Corpse and Auclair) collaborate again to present Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls. They come together through a shared enjoyment of sound, weird and wonderful films and creative community. 

Exploring the impact of erasure and the truths that endure despite it. There exists a sisyphean struggle to erase certain truths from our lives in an effort to control the wild nature of existence. Amidst this erasure, what truths endure?

From Palestinian worldmaking to the Cuban revolution, French colonial capture and Mexican post-revolutionary artistic revivals to the subversion of monuments of indigenous people, this programme explores art's relationship to (anti)coloniality across a range of historical and national contexts.

Underneath the walls and the fences, the checkpoints and the watchtowers, the waters never cease to flow, eroding the (infra)structures of oppression. In this double-bill, two filmmakers set their gaze upon the cityscapes of Bethlehem and Berlin, while zooming in on the architectural marks left by the state violence.

Reflecting on the traces that linger in the quiet pursuit to understand what lies ahead.In our most delicate moments of reflection, how are we to reconcile the lingering fragments bridging past and present?

The selection of six non-/fiction diary films, capture the moment everyday life is transformed into a poem - and the mundane is made to become sacred.

Fleeing persecution in the US, Hungarian architect László Tóth is commissioned to construct a monumental building. Driven by a powerful performance from Adrien Brody, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist explores trauma, art’s value, and ambition’s price.

A programme of new short films for lovers of the hauntological, or those interested in the psychogeography of forgotten spaces.

Is any story ever the full truth? Can the same truth ever be recounted twice? Here, six shorts challenge the delineation of documentary and fiction, reminding us that there are even more sides to a story than there are voices to tell them.

Gentrification and unregulated landlordism are fracturing communities, while social housing disintegrates and profits soar. However, as these films constantly underline we can and should resist. 

Filmmaker Basim Magdy is simultaneously interested and dismissive of the meanings concealed within the world; as he layers interpretations, he increasingly questions their authenticity. His work doesn't concern itself with a fixed contemporary reality which he views as a masked parade of absurdity. In his eyes, there is no sense or logic in the world—time, memory, future, and dreams all blur together, dissolving into a hazy in-between.

Fleeing persecution in the US, Hungarian architect László Tóth is commissioned to construct a monumental building. Driven by a powerful performance from Adrien Brody, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist explores trauma, art’s value, and ambition’s price.

East German teacher Philipp questions his sexuality after reconnecting with a childhood friend, in this 1989 film by Heiner Carow.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste delivers a career-best performance as Pansy, a woman battling grief, rage, and disconnection in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, three decades after their collaboration on Secrets and Lies. 

The latest film from Hong Sangsoo reunites Kim Minhee and Kwon Haehyo in an autumnal tale of desire, self-expression and the inescapable nature of the past.

The first film from the former Yugoslavia to openly depict LGBTQ+ characters, remains one of Želimir Žilnik’s most enduring works, even more brilliant for its open acts of love and positivity at a time of such misery.

A special programme of five films celebrating the work of Michael Snow (1929-2023), titan of experimental cinema.

This programme, containing one film from each decade between the 1990s and 2010s, offers a condensed overview of the dynamism, intransigence, transnationalism, and experiential spirit of Iranian auteur Amir Naderi’s output in three films made in the US and Japan.

The UK’s biggest festival of Japanese cinema, the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme (JFTFP), returns to the ICA for its latest installment.

Shot entirely in secret, Mohammad Rasoulof’s searing drama depicts a man’s growing paranoia around encroaching state repression, whilst his family’s increasingly anti-patriarchal conviction at home threatens his carefully constructed public life.

Awarded Best Film in the BFI London Film Festival’s Official Competition, Adam Elliot’s heartfelt animation about twins navigating loss, blends humour and darkness.

From Tokyo to the Lake District – a universal portrait of love, acceptance and family loss in which the true journey toward forgiveness and reconciliation will prove the hardest of all.

Mahdi Fleifel’s first fiction feature portrays Chatila, a Palestinian refugee in Athens, as he cares for his addicted cousin Reda while seeking an escape to Germany.

From Tokyo to the Lake District – a universal portrait of love, acceptance and family loss in which the true journey toward forgiveness and reconciliation will prove the hardest of all.

New Contemporaries and ICA have invited exhibiting artists to select and introduce a film that has been formative, or a reference in their practice.   

Legendary provocateur Bruce LaBruce reimagines Pasolini’s Teorema, with a refugee protagonist liberating the bourgeoisie from sexual repression, critiquing anti-immigration rhetoric and exploring sexual and spiritual transformations.

The endlessly blurred and tangled lines of reality and fiction, cinema and theatre, and art and life form the heart of Jacques Rivette’s cinema. Throughout his extensive body of work the French filmmaker continually eschews and reformulates the traditional patterns of narrative cinema and instead embraces mystery, conspiracy, and the inexplicable.

Anne arrives in Paris to study, but quickly finds herself enwrapped in the lives of a loose-knit group of bohemians and the mysterious death of their friend. A detective story by way of Shakespeare's Pericles, Jacques Rivette's sublime debut feature is a labyrinth of conspiracies, deception and cold-war paranoia.

Walker Salles' return to fiction depicts the Paiva family's struggle for justice after Rubens Paiva's 1970 disappearance under Brazil’s military regime.

A documentary portrait of British photographer Martin Parr’s politically charged, humanist and humorous work.

Lilith Kraxner and Milena Czernovsky’s film follows two women through a series of drifting vignettes. Their quotidian moments blend and overlay reality with performance, describing an aching state, and a meditation on identity.

The third iteration of Late Tapes series; an exploration of fetishistic desire, curated by Content Warning in collaboration with the Bishopsgate Institute’s UK Fetish Archive.

Legendary provocateur Bruce LaBruce reimagines Pasolini’s Teorema, with a refugee protagonist liberating the bourgeoisie from sexual repression, critiquing anti-immigration rhetoric and exploring sexual and spiritual transformations.

Initially banned by the Information Ministry in France after outcry from the Catholic community, Jacques Rivette's second feature, an adaptation of Diderot's famous novel, follows the life of a young woman (Anna Karina) who is forced, against her will, to take vows as a nun.

Sine Screen presents a programme of radical films born from the collective labour of filmmakers who rejected traditional hierarchies, aiming to create cinema for and by the people, in 1960s and 1970s East and Southeast Asia.

Sent on a covert mission in Latin America, a Vietnam veteran’s allegiance begins to unravel as his awareness of his Latino heritage and role in an imperial conflict grows.

New Contemporaries and ICA have invited exhibiting artists to select and introduce a film that has been formative, or a reference in their practice.   

Between the making of La Religieuse and L'amour fou, Rivette directed a three part documentary on the great Jean Renoir. The experience would prove profoundly impactful, particularly on his work with actors. One of the many films Rivette revisited was Jean Renoir's La chienne, a bitter tale of amour fou which marked a watershed in the storied collaboration between the filmmaker and actor Michael Simon.

When the glittering Las Vegas revue she has headlined for decades announces it will close, Shelley (Pamela Anderson) sets out to plan her next act. Reconciling the life she's built, she decides to repair the complicated relationship with her daughter. 

Set against the backdrop of the Nuremberg Trials, this 1976 documentary raises urgent questions about violence, war, and justice that are still relevant today. This special screening, introduced by international lawyer Professor Philippe Sands Hon FBA.

Shot in a dazzling mixture of 35mm and 16mm film stocks, Jacques Rivette's hypnotic and long unavailable study of tempestuous love is one of the filmmakers most radical works.

To coincide with the BFI's retrospective, the ICA presents a curated programme of work by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman.

The act of wandering the streets of a city becomes a source of both joy and despair in this pair of coming-of-age tales from filmmaker Chantal Akerman.

A poetic exploration of domestic space, solitude, and daily rituals, these films capture the tension between repetition and rupture, where ordinary spaces become sites of both freedom and entrapment. 

James Baldwin left New York behind for Paris in November 1948. Filmmaker Yashaddai Owens paints an impressionistic portrait of these early days on rich 16mm black-and-white, capturing a transformative moment in the life of a young artist.

Raoul Peck's portrait of Ernest Cole, a South African photographer who was the first to expose the horrors of apartheid to a world audience, resulting in his exile.

Wanda and Janek struggle to navigate their relationship, discovering not all is lost, in Maria Zbąska’s debut exploring love’s survival in a disposable world.

Aurora, a Portuguese migrant warehouse worker in Scotland, seeks connection amidst alienation.

Drawing inspiration from both the silent serials of Louis Feuillade and Balzac's mammoth La Comédie humaine, Jacques Rivette's freewheeling epic, often referred to as cinema's "holy grail", is an all-consuming odyssey through the remnants of post-68 Paris.

The dog is apparently man's best friend, but what about its relationship to women? The immaculately groomed purebreds and dry humour of Good Girl... Sit Down! might seem miles apart from the languor of Dog Lady and its pack of mutts, but in both films, dogs figure as an important part of a woman's search for beauty and freedom.

In these quiet explorations of alienation and desire, everyday moments become a stage for the search for connection, blurring the line between self-exposure and introspection.

An intense psychological drama featuring Amanda Seyfried as a troubled opera director facing current and past traumas as she works on a new staging of Salomé.

Jérémie returns to his hometown for his former boss's funeral. A mysterious disappearance, a threatening neighbour, and a strange priest complicate his visit. This screening is followed by a Q&A with Alain Guiraudie.

The Austrian Cultural Forum London, in cooperation with the Austrian Film Institute, presents the third edition of watchAUT, a dedicated film festival featuring the best new and recent films to emerge from Austria that is both a timely snapshot and an intriguing reflection of the current status quo. 

Hemmed into the marital bond of an arranged partnership in Mumbai, new bride Uma acts out in surprising, misanthropic and hugely charming ways. Karan Kandhari’s debut film is a punk celebration of embracing one’s impulses.

In Veni Vidi Vici, the ultra-wealthy have reached the ultimate privilege: getting away with murder.

An intense psychological drama featuring Amanda Seyfried as a troubled opera director facing current and past traumas as she works on a new staging of Salomé.

What seems like a dream job for Sarah, a retired Austrian martial artist hired to train three teenage sisters in Jordan, quickly turns eerie.

Akerman’s journey into filmmaking began with her first Super 8 films for her admission to INSAS. This programme brings together these early films with Akerman's poetic city symphony.

Austrian experimental cinema has long been a hotbed of radical ideas and daring artistry, as this programme of shorts attests to.

An infamous Austrian cult movie from 1983, that dives into the life and mind of a serial killer recently released from prison, who quickly feels the compulsion to kill again.

Jacques Rivette's fragmentary rescrambling of the epic Out 1, is rather appropriately a ghostly companion to its progenitor and a singular work all its own. A film both haunted by its past and an arresting evolution of it.

When you hear “Piggy Bank,” you might picture a cute porcelain pig — until it’s time to smash it.

When 80-year-old Mehrunisa’s husband dies, she sets her sights on an overdue dream: a starring role in a Bollywood epic.

As a part of our retrospective of the work of Jacques Rivette, we are delighted to present Howard Hawk's classic technicolor musical, a key inspiration for Céline and Julie Go Boating, screening exclusively for ICA Members and their guests.

The second edition of Screen Cuba, a festival that celebrates Cuba’s pioneering homegrown cinema industry, presents films rarely screened in the UK and looks at the achievements and challenges of the Cuban people through the decolonising lenses of their filmmakers since the 1959 revolution.

A satire on life (and death) during the ‘Special Period’ in Cuba following the demise of the Soviet Union, in the form of an entertaining road movie by Tomás Alea, Cuba’s most celebrated director, just before his death.

Two stories unfold within the stillness of a hotel where walls echo with the past, and corridors and windows speak of encounters, lovers and lost time.

When artist Maggie breaks her femur, her husband Joel, a famous photographer, becomes her caregiver. The hard truths of life together provoke an attempt to find a shared peace while there's time.

For two years, filmmakers Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau followed a militant activist community of squatters, anarchists, farmers in France. Composed of forty-one long takes, the film quietly assembles an immersive portrait of the movement and those involved alongside their activism.

In rural Northern India, recently widowed Santosh reluctantly takes the place of her murdered police constable husband in this complex thriller.

In 1930s Podhale, mountaineer Jędrek Zawrat’s love and loyalty clash with family, history, and wartime politics, as brothers face the controversial Goralenvolk decision, shaping their fates and region’s future.

Jacques Rivette's joyously madcap tale of a librarian and a magician whose chance encounter leads them into a strange Henry James inspired melodrama, is an entrancing examination of the nature of filmmaking and watching.

A landmark of 1970s cinema, The Passenger follows a weary journalist who assumes the identity of a dead man, embarking on a journey across continents, borders, and ultimately his own identity. 

Memories of Underdevelopment is the most internationally renowned film in the history of Cuban cinema, exploring the thoughts of privileged would-be writer Sergio as he faces a new uncertain life after his wife and family flee to the US in the early 1960s.

DIG! XX is the 20th anniversary extended edition of the rock documentary DIG!, which adds new narration by The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Joel Gion and features never-before-seen footage, bringing this epic tale through to today.

A new discovery from the Iranian underground, screening in London for the first time. A man hires an assistant for a high-risk treasure hunt, drawing them both into the haunted heart of a country reckoning with its past and uncertain of its future.

Drawing inspiration from both the writing of Gérard de Nerval and classic film noirs, Jacques Rivette's tale of two warring Goddesses awakened on the shadowy rain swept streets of 1970s Paris, is both an astounding feat of generic interpolation and an enthralling exploration of fate and mortality.

A tense and human musical about a family that survived the end of the world, from the director of The Act of Killing. Followed by an in-person Q&A with Joshua Oppenheimer and George MacKay.

Jérémie returns to his hometown for his former boss's funeral. A mysterious disappearance, a threatening neighbour, and a strange priest complicate his visit. 

A tense and human musical about a family that survived the end of the world, from the director of The Act of Killing.

An exploration of a world shaped by neurodiverse perspectives, capturing diverse subjects navigating environments both challenging and comforting. Characters, some concealing their autism, others thriving in their communities, share a common goal: finding a space free from societal norms.

A tribute to the revolutionary Cuban filmmaker Santiago Álvarez and his “urgent cinema” approach he developed, making hundreds of incredibly innovative newsreels and documentaries raising public consciousness from the early 1960s. Followed by three important early shorts by Alvarez.

Jean Cocteau's second interpretation of the Orpheus myth is a peerless work of visual poetry whose echoes reverberate through Rivette's oeuvre – from the labyrinthine streets of Paris to the marrying of the modern and the fantastical.

This Stephen Sayadian (aka Rinse Dream) double bill presents a unique and timely opportunity to both discover and appreciate the true auteur of Americana’s dark underbelly. Presented by the Armenian Film Society London (AFSL) and Daniel Bird.

As sexually deranged as it is stylistically unhinged, this psychedelic surrealist neo-noir reworking of the 1920 German expressionist classic features Laura Albert as Mrs Van Houten, a woman whose libido is dangerously out of control. There’s only one place for her: the Caligari Insane Asylum.

A dystopian sci-fi oddity from one of American cinema's true underground originals, Café Flesh is a post-apocalyptic “adults-only” reworking of Bob Fosse’ Cabaret.

Inspired by Cyril Tourneur's Jacobean drama The Revenger's Tragedy, the third part of Jacques Rivette's Scènes de la vie parallèle is a balletic tale of revenge centred upon Morag's (Geraldine Chaplin) quest to avenge the death of her brother at the hands of Giulia (Bernadette Lafont), the leader of a band of pirates.

An exploration of a world shaped by neurodiverse perspectives, capturing diverse subjects navigating environments both challenging and comforting. Characters, some concealing their autism, others thriving in their communities, share a common goal: finding a space free from societal norms.

David Cronenberg’s 1983 cult classic on a 35mm print from the ICA Archives.

Despite its somewhat beleaguered production and a less than rapturous reception from critics upon its release, Jacques Rivette's final film of the 1970s is a perfect distillation of the paranoia, conspiracy and mystery that defined much of his work during the previous two decades. 

A selection of work by influential French documentarian Sylvain George, the first of its kind in the UK.

In transit through the city of Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, Malik and his friends, minors of Moroccan origin, try to reach Europe. Day after night, they wander the city in all directions, exploring its most burning pasts and presents.

In Angola, 1974, as independence nears, a girl and a group of Portuguese soldiers confront love, death, and justice amid war. 

Themes of love and migration play out in the fire and frenzy of a New York kitchen in Alonso Ruizpalacios' adaptation of Arnold Wesker's stage play.

The first full retrospective of the great Polish director Wojciech Jerzy Has, is presented in partnership with KINOTEKA and the BFI.

A selection of three short films, No Border, N’entre pas sans violence and Nocturne Blanc-Chasseur, made between 2007 and 2015 on mini-DV and Super 8, focused on the experiences of migrants in Paris.

Felicja hides actor Wiktor from persecution in her flat, but his selfishness strains their relationship, damaging her life and career.

Tadeusz obsessively searches for his missing son, using conflicting scraps of conflicting information gleaned from possibly unreliable witnesses, but his quest alienates him from family and reality.

The city of Paris becomes a labyrinthine board game, as a chance encounter between a claustrophobic ex-con (Bulle Ogier) and a leather-clad young woman (Pascale Ogier) quickly embroils them both in a sinister underworld conspiracy.

Puerta del Sol, Madrid. A document of the 15M movement, one of the largest movements of class struggle of this century, functioning as an experimental newsreel. 

Jane Birkin and Geraldine Chaplin star as actresses recruited by an enigmatic playwright (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) to star in a new work, but as rehearsals begin in his grand mansion, the lines between performance and reality begin to blur. A beguiling and haunting exploration of the mysteries of love and art.

Based on short story by Chekhov, Wojciech Has’ first film after a decade's pause explores an elderly professor’s existential musings and personal frustrations.

A revelatory inside-look at John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s life in Greenwich Village in the early 1970s, from Academy Award-winner Kevin Macdonald.

18 year-old Totone spends his time drinking and partying in the Jura region of France, until reality catches up to him, and he must find a way to make a living to care for his 7 year-old sister.

Assembled from footage shot over a span of more than twenty years, Jia Zhangke crafts a boundless story of enduring but fragile love, anchored by the eternally captivating presence of Zhao Tao.

A screening of Wojciech Has’ eleven short films, made between 1947-1955.

Closing out a landmark cycle of noir's that began with Laura, Otto Preminger's tale of an ambulance driver drawn into the orbit of a wealthy young woman is one of the filmmakers most enigmatic works. In his essay L'essentiel, Rivette argued that the film was a skeleton key for understanding Preminger's work at large and his belief in mise en scène.

A cult classic, this adaptation of Jan Potocki’s novel blends Napoleonic and Inquisition-era stories with supernatural twists, anchored by a bewildered-looking Zbigniew Cybulski.

Brutal and despairing, Jacques Rivette's radical reinterpretation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights transposes its tale of love and revenge from the English countryside to a Chateau in 1930s France.

Performance takes centre stage in this tale of four aspiring actresses, studying under the tutelage of a famed tutor, who find themselves embroiled in an increasingly menacing off-stage drama. 

Structured in 14 episodes (screening over three consecutive days), exergue – on documenta 14 offers a look behind the scenes of the institutional contemporary art world. Presented in partnership with Open City Documentary Festival.

A celebration of the extraordinary life of Irish writer Edna O'Brien.

To coincide with the screening of exergue - on documenta 14, Adam Szymczyk, artistic director of documenta 14, will be present in-person for an in-depth conversation, hosted by Chris McCormack. Co-presented with Open City Documentary Festival and Art Monthly.

The fourth screening in the Late Tapes series, an exploration of fetishistic desire, curated by Content Warning in collaboration with the Bishopsgate Institute’s UK Fetish Archive.

Journalist Rafał, safecracker Szpicbródka, and monk Sykstus are cellmates in Has' vivid and delirious vision where reality and fiction blur.

Sound and image stare each other in the face as Oksana Karpovych contrasts quiet compositions of everyday life of Ukrainians since the full-scale invasion with intercepted phone conversations between Russian soldiers and their families.

Inspired by James Hogg’s 1824, Has' film follows Robert’s haunting life, crimes, and encounters with a devilish Doppelgänger.

In 16th-century Germany, Balthazar and alchemist Cammerschulze flee to Venice, amid plague and religious persecution.

Unfolding as a series of interconnected conversations between Rivette and legendary writer and critic Serge Daney, Claire Denis' documentary, produced for Cinéma, de notre temps, is a wonderfully intimate invitation into the work, life and philosophy of a singular artist.

Leonardo van Dijl's debut feature is a taut study of a young athlete in crisis.

In Déa Kulumbegashvili’s second feature, an obstetrician’s secret abortion work in rural Georgia is exposed after a tragedy, threatening her purpose and freedom.

A hallucinatory masterpiece blending Bruno Schulz’s novella with Has’s obsessions, where Józef, seeking his past, finds a sanatorium portal revealing his fears. Stylistically rich, with a striking atonal score.

The festival closes with a special musical interpretation of Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bester Quartet.

Huw Wahl’s compelling analogue exploration of engineless sailing.

The ICA partners with the Garden Cinema to present a 12-film retrospective curated by Instituto Rouanet, commemorating 60 years of L.C. Barreto Film Productions, Brazil’s legendary production company, helmed by the renowned family of filmmakers.

The subject of one of Jacques Rivette's most famous essays for Cahiers du cinéma, Roberto Rossellini's tale of marital strife in the Neapolitan countryside is a groundbreaking work of modernism and a heartbreaking anatomy of a relationship.

Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s impassioned adaptation of the novel by Graciliano Ramos, which follows an itinerant family traversing a drought-stricken sertão of northeastern Brazil, is considered one of the most important works of Brazilian cinema.

Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press and Xiaolu Guo will discuss recent films by Banner, and their shared interest in the slippages of language and conflict. Banner will present two recent short films along with as a selection of earlier works including Pranayama Organ (2021).

January 2020. A film crew reunites near Wuhan to resume the shooting of a film halted ten years earlier, only to share the unexpected challenges as cities are placed under lockdown.

Freely inspired by Balzac's novella Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu and featuring outstanding performances from Michael Piccoli, Emmanuelle Béart and Jane Birkin, Rivette's exploration of the artistic process and the at times tempestuous relationship between artist and model is a profoundly moving examination of the creative process and artistic obsession.

Bruno Barreto was 20 years old when he injected new life into Brazilian cinema and announced Sônia Braga to the world with this sensuous comedy-fantasy, based on the brilliant Jorge Amado’s 1966 novel. Co-starring José Wilker (Bye Bye Brazil) and featuring music by Chico Buarque.

A vividly unsettling mixture of sexploitation sleaze and hard-boiled melodrama, Bruno Barreto’s follow-up to Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands centres on a doomed romance set against the backdrop of a wanton killing spree in Rio’s Copacabana.

A police chief is sent to a diamond mine to stop a tyrannical inspector. While travelling through the forest, he becomes involved in a tragic love affair with a beautiful indigenous girl.

A cross-disciplinary festival that showcases boundary-pushing LGBTQ+ cinema, live arts, and moving image work from East and Southeast Asia and its diaspora communities.

Khim-Hok is an elderly man who has come to depend on his wife Siu-Tuan over the years. Absent from their life, however, is their estranged son, whose existence remains largely unspoken. Shot on 16mm film, this feature debut by co-directors Tzu-Hui Peng and Ping-Wen Wang paints a raw and sensitive portrait of domestic life.

Luiz Carlos Barreto’s directorial debut—assembled from hundreds of hours of footage with Cinema Novo editor Eduardo Escorel (Entranced Earth, Macunaíma, among many others)—tells the story of the Brazilian team’s first three World Cup wins with the record-breaking footballer as its protagonist.

January 2020. A film crew reunites near Wuhan to resume the shooting of a film halted ten years earlier, only to share the unexpected challenges as cities are placed under lockdown.

Arguably one of the greatest films about soccer, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s debut feature is a form-shifting documentary portrait of his country’s beloved bow-legged dribbler Mané Garrincha.

A Tokyo factory worker’s online side business descends into paranoia and dread, in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's (Pulse and Cure) moody thriller exploring technology’s dark grip on human behaviour and morality.

A burglar and the owner of a house he attempts to rob journey across Vietnam to the homeowner’s wife’s grave where he wishes to join her. 

For the first instalment of his ambitious yet restrained two-part study of Jeanne d'Arc, Jacques Rivette surveys the revelatory period where Jeanne met with royalty, joined the army, and led the French into battle against the English.

A programme of recent artists’ moving image, exploring processes of self-discovery, curated by Abirami Logendran and Morgan Quaintance.

Based on Graciliano Ramos’s posthumously published memoirs, this extraordinarily ambitious film from Nelson Pereira dos Santos centres on Ramos (Carlos Vereza) sinking ever deeper into a bizarre nightmare after he is locked up with other political prisoners in Rio de Janeiro and then, eventually, with all stripes of inmates on a remote island.

Rooted in the poetics and quotidian details of daily life, the second part of Rivette's diptych on the life of Jeanne d'Arc, traces every step on the road to Jeanne’s saintly fate, from her waning influence in the courts to her imprisonment and death.

Set in 1950s–60s Rio amid Brazil’s brewing military coup, the turbulent relationship between American poet Elizabeth Bishop (Miranda Otto) and architect Lota de Macedo Soares (Glória Pires) offers a unique perspective on this period in Brazil’s history.

The open space for non-fiction cinema returns for its 15th edition.

On the occasion of the launch of How to Do Things with VALIE EXPORT, a new book on her filmic work published by the Austrian Film Museum (Vienna) and Spector Books (Leipzig), we present a selection of canonical and lesser-known films by VALIE EXPORT, followed by a conversation about the artist's work.

Sanrizuka – Peasants of the Second Fortress is the fourth in a series of seven films shot between 1968 and 1977 by Ogawa Productions in the fields of Sanrizuka. Four years into the conflict, the authorities started the coercive expropriation of the farmlands, and the violence escalated. 

Arguably the most reputed yet enigmatic film from Qin Dao, this work transcends celluloid, screen, and the social milieu of post-socialist China, while interrogating the nature of cinema. Followed by a conversation with Qin Dao and Bo Wang.

A selection of shorts tracing the Cantrills’ early filmmaking practice and their travels.

A DIY investigation to uncover the woman behind the face of ‘Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing’, an educational software programme developed in the 1980s. 

In 1977, Arthur and Corinne Cantrill took their first trip into central Australia to film Uluru. Second Journey (to Uluru) documents the filmmakers’ next visit to Uluru some years later, on a trip taken with the filmmaker Michael Lee.

In response to his latest, autobiographical film Being John Smith, this programme brings together four works that explore, in different ways, what it is to “be” John Smith.

An insight into the private estate of Leni Riefenstahl, who became world-famous with her Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, but continually denied any closer ties to the regime.

Artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan has a sonic research practice that acts to investigate human rights abuses. In this essay film he focuses his “Private Ear” into analysing sonic data generated by the UN to chart the incessant noise pollution emanating from unauthorised Israeli plane and drone flights into Lebanese airspace. Preceded by Elisabeth Subrin's Manal Issa, 2024.

Corinne Cantrill’s sole-authored, autobiographical feature, in which she traces her life story through a series of photographs and probes the relationships between body and image, cinema and photography, the moving and the static.

Desire leaves traces – on bodies, in memories, in the flickering frames of old VHS tapes. Les fantômes du hard is a journey through these remnants, an attempt to reconstruct a lost history of hardcore sexuality in Marseille.

This programme brings together three new works by UK-based artists Alex Nevill, Hope Strickland and Rhea Storr who will all be present for a post-screening discussion.

In collaboration with the Ian White Estate, Open City is pleased to present the fourth Ian White Lecture, given by writer Esther Kinsky.

The debut feature-length work by Maxime Jean-Baptiste follows Melrick, a young teenage boy, as he spends a summer in French Guiana with his grandmother Nicole. Followed by a Q&A with Maxime Jean-Baptiste.

In a sleepy town in China, a middle-aged man is unwilling to endure a stagnant existence, and experiencing true love, decides to come out of the closet.

Inspired by MGM’s low budget musicals of the 1950s, Rivette crafts an all-singing all-dancing sojourn through a sweltering Parisian summer in this captivating story of love, friendship and liberation.

A special programme of eight films celebrating the work of award-winning Iranian film and theatre actress Fatemeh Motamed-Arya.

In post-war Iran, Reyhaneh seeks independence after leaving her husband, but faces family pressure, tradition, and looming financial hardship.

A playful, surreal journey through Iranian cinema’s early days, this film follows King Nasser edin Shah, who, enchanted by silent film Lor Girl, forsakes his throne to chase cinematic dreams.

The ill-prepared crew of an American documentary production stumble into a rural town in Argentina in pursuit of their next viral story, and things spiral into from bathos into trendy mayhem.

A 17-year-old girl joins her father and his friend on a forest hike, where quiet tensions mount. An assured portrayal of restraint and rupture, featuring a standout lead performance.

The third programme in YES & NO Presents Austrian Artist Film is Queercore, a programme focusing on the close Super 8 collaboration between Ursula Pürrer and Ashley Hans Scheirl in the 1980s.

A poetic exploration of Eileen Gray’s life and visionary design, unveiling the story behind her iconic modernist house, a record of art and resilience by the sea.

Akbar, a serious actor, is torn between art, commercial roles, and his wife's desperate wish for a child.

Amid Norouz celebrations, an Abadan family traumatised by war faces addiction, strained ties, and crisis after a mistaken U.S. bombing.

The subject of one of Rivette's most famous essays for Cahiers du cinéma, Fritz Lang's last film in the U.S is, at its heart, a treatise on the very concepts of innocence and guilt, as a novelist conspires to frame himself for murder as a part of an effort to ban capital punishment.

Michio Okabe’s underground film was shot on 16mm in Shinjuku in 1968, and documents the radical spirit of Japan’s creative and artistic scene in those years.

A satirical look at the frenzied professional and romantic lives of the staff of a daytime TV show. Screening on a 16mm print from the ICA archive.

Jacques Rivette's contemporary interpretation of the Greek tragedy Elektra is a taut and elegant thriller of filial revenge imbued with an ascetic fatalism and anchored by outstanding performances by Sandrine Bonnaire and Jerzy Radziwilowicz.

As Edhi prepares to undergo gender reassignment surgery, she is filmed by a crew that includes lighting technician Alice. Exploring connections between the two women’s stories, director and queer activist Ilrhan Kim interrogates how documentaries about trans communities are made: the creative decisions, relationships, and ethical questions involved.

This Machine that Kills Bad People features two films with children as their protagonists and collaborators: Christmas at Moose Factory (1971) by Alanis Obomsawin, and Bloody Beans (2013), written and directed by Narimane Mari.

Elderly farmer Rasul forms a bond with a young worker in this poignant tale of love, class, and convention.

Exalted by many among the Nouvelle vague, in particular Rivette, Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi's final film, completed just months before his death, interweaves portraits of five women working in “Dreamland,” a brothel in Tokyo’s notorious and then historic Yoshiwara red-light district.

In the remote mountains of rural Taiwan, Oom, an undocumented Thai migrant works as a caregiver to the elderly and disabled in the face of enduring hardship and exploitation. 

Benicio del Toro is Zsa-zsa Korda, one of the richest men in Europe, in Wes Anderson's latest, a story of a family and a family business. 

Yeong-gyeong and Su-hwan meet at a wedding party. He carries her home after she passes out drunk. Kang Mi-ja's Spring Night is a stark and graceful depiction of a doomed kinship. 

The light breaks on a long summer’s day in Iceland. From one sunset to another, Una, a young art student encounters love, friendship, sorrow and beauty.

Set across two wars, this moving drama follows Gilaneh, a mother whose dreams are shattered as she cares for her war-scarred son and supports her daughter through love, loss, and resilience.

A film about memory, identity, and the joy and confusion of searching, Rivette combines Pirandello with an almost screwball comedy sensibility in this effortlessly breezy roundelay of intersecting lives and loves.

Inspired by Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, this poignant drama follows Farideh, a struggling mother in Tehran, trying to support her family and find hope for her fragile, dream-filled daughter, Yalda.

A solitary clockmaker finds his nefarious attempts at blackmail sidetracked by the appearance of a mysterious woman who bears a striking resemblance to a former lover. Rivette returns to his Scènes de la vie parallèle cycle with this sublime and moving work about time, memory and love. 

A man's solitary life in a Scottish highland forest is portrayed through the changing seasons, with occasional encounters disrupting his otherwise isolated existence in Ben Rivers follow-up to Two Years at Sea.

Homa, the most accomplished nurse in the hospital is asked to care for the elderly mother of the owner of the hospital. The next ten days sees continuous snow fall, trapping both women but opening a host of unknown doors.

One of two films Jacques Rivette cited as defining an entire generation of French cinema, Robert Bresson's tale of sexual intrigue, rivalry and revenge among Parisian socialites, is a piercing study of the pitfalls and power of love.

An incisive exploration of the social mores of courtship and the maddening nature of desire, Jacques Rivette's adaptation of Honoré de Balzac's novella La Duchesse de Langeais is a biting chamber drama of selfish passions and competing agendas.

A special screening of the BAFTA and BIFA nominated documentary The Hard Stop, marking ten years since its release. The film examines the aftermath of the 2011 riots following the police shooting of Mark Duggan, an unarmed Black man killed by the Metropolitan Police during a “hard stop” manoeuvre in Tottenham, North London.

An Italian traveler finds himself drawn into the world of a travelling circus after a chance encounter on a mountain roadside. Jacques Rivette's swan song is a deceptively slight return to one of his most beloved obsessions — the interplay between life and performance.

Inspired by a true story, this touching film follows Shokoo as she brings her ailing ex-husband into her home, confronting love, memory, and forgiveness alongside her current husband, Reza.

A urgent documentary chronicling the Columbia University Gaza Solidarity Encampments that began in April 2024. 

Through an intimate reconstruction of an important phone call, Iva Radivojević’s evocative film investigates dislocation and the nature of remembering. 

Cinema-ye Azad, or Free Cinema, was an underground movement of filmmakers in Iran that began in 1969, with the explicit aim of creating a fully independent cinema. This programme brings together two films which represent the range of sensibilities and approaches encompassed within Cinema-ye Azad.

A woman seeks her own brand of justice when her sister’s sexual harassment case is smothered by acts of foul play. Screening on a 16mm print from the ICA archive.

Genesis P-Orridge lived their art to the extreme. A pioneering musician, avant-garde artist, spiritual explorer and gender revolutionary, Genesis has been featured in films and videos, but never the full story… never this intimate... until now.

A collage of archival segments from the 1993-1994 years of Dyke TV that still speak powerfully to lesbians today — stories that make us laugh, flirt, rage, and organise. 

A soul-searching story about three friends, Wolf, Alan and Sophie, who have different conditions of deafness.

Three Portuguese queer short films brought together in a program that charts an alternative path through converging universes, forming a new constellation of desires, fears, and struggles.

The fifth instalment in the Late Tapes series, an exploration of fetishistic desire hand-picked by Harlan and Helena Whittingham a.k.a Content Warning in collaboration with the Bishopsgate Institute’s UK Fetish Archive.

SAFAR Film Festival, the UK’s leading platform for independent Arab cinema, returns from 11-28 June 2025 for its landmark 10th edition. 

In director Anas Zawahri’s first feature length documentary, he crafts a visual elegy of Homs, Syria; a city suspended between the echoes of its past and the silence of its present. 

In Cairo’s crowded streets, 30-year-old Hassan (Essam Omar) faces eviction alongside his mother (Samaa Ibrahim) and loyal dog, Rambo. When a violent altercation forces Rambo to defend him, Hassan must navigate a hostile city in search of safety and confront his deepest fears along the way.

Celina Escher’s documentary follows Teodora and The Seventeen – a group of women accused of murder because of having a miscarriage in El Salvador - in their struggle to regain their freedom from prison.

Commissioned to create a documentary about Argentine art collective Mondongo, filmmaker
Mariano Llinás crafts an experimental portrait of friendship, failure and self-destruction.

Inspired by true events, Lotfi Achour's powerful debut feature is a poetic and unflinching descent into the fractured psyche of a child grappling with unspeakable violence—and the quiet, resilient strength it takes to survive.

Six women return to the now abandoned Holloway Prison to take part in a women’s circle. Sharing some of the most intimate experiences of their lives, they each unravel what led them to prison, building an eye-opening portrait of failing systems and trauma, while discovering their extraordinary capacity to heal through sisterhood.

Genesis P-Orridge lived their art to the extreme. A pioneering musician, avant-garde artist, spiritual explorer and gender revolutionary, Genesis has been featured in films and videos, but never the full story… never this intimate... until now.

From Lebanon’s mountain forests to its arid plains, Rooted Resistance brings together four powerful short films that bear witness to the deep ties between nature, memory, and survival across the Arab region. 

Martin Creed presents the first rough cut of a new film. There will be the chance to engage with Martin during the discussion following the screening.

A man's solitary life in a Scottish highland forest is portrayed through the changing seasons, with occasional encounters disrupting his otherwise isolated existence in Ben Rivers follow-up to Two Years at Sea. Followed by a Q&A with Ben Rivers

SAFAR Film Festival is proud to be presenting the newly restored Watch Out for Zouzou (1972), by Hassan Al-Imam, a beloved 1970s Egyptian musical brimming with wit, romance, and cultural tension

At 40 years old, Saify Muhammed is a washed-up confidence trickster who owes money to everyone, including his ex-wife. Now he finds himself trying his hand at blackmail.

Inspired by an incredible true story set against the backdrop of a country torn by conflict, From Hilde, with Love is a powerful tale of love and resistance.

In a ghost-haunted Cairo, a grieving doctor and his friend—cursed with mint sprouting from his scalp—wander through decaying ruins in search of refuge from the memories that refuse to die.

Spanning the years from the Sudanese revolution of 2019, to the outbreak of the grievous civil war in 2023, this immensely moving documentary captures a collective portrait of Sudanese youth, dreaming of a new, democratic Sudan.

In a Cairo once alive with the promise of change, now haunted by memory, a heartbroken doctor and his troubled friend drift through the city’s decaying streets and abandoned homes.

Spanning the years from the Sudanese revolution of 2019, to the outbreak of the grievous civil war in 2023, this immensely moving documentary captures a collective portrait of Sudanese youth, dreaming of a new, democratic Sudan.

In this intensely personal work, David Cronenberg crafts a genre-bending tale that slips between mystery and romance, all the while echoing his signature themes: the body as mutable flesh, technology as both saviour and parasite, and the uncanny union of sex and death.

Rebecca Lenkiewicz makes her directorial debut with a moody adaptation of Deborah Levy’s Booker Prize-nominated novel, featuring performances by Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, and Vicky Krieps.

Remastered for the first time, The Quatermass Xperiment still retains its power to shock seven decades after its initial release.

This urgent documentary examines evidence of widespread destruction across Gaza’s medical infrastructure, where all 36 main hospitals have reportedly been damaged or destroyed. Followed by a panel discussion hosted by Bassem Youssef.

Nigel Kneale and Val Guest's gripping tale of alien infiltration and Cold War paranoia is presented for the first time in 4K.

Athina Rachel Tsangari’s (Attenberg, Chevalier) striking adaptation of Jim Crace’s acclaimed novel finds an idyllic rural community coming under threat from outsiders. Followed by a Q&A with the director.

This urgent documentary examines evidence of widespread destruction across Gaza’s medical infrastructure. Screenings are followed by Q&As with filmmakers and doctors.

An essayistic exploration into the lasting ecological consequences of Belgium’s colonial rule in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

A nine-day festival of archival gems to celebrate the conclusion of our Celluloid Sunday series including rare prints of films by Hou-Hsiao Hsien, Edward Yang, Jim Jarmusch, David Cronenberg and many more.

Imbued with a languid and troubling sense of unease, Yang’s third feature The Terrorizers centres the mysterious connections that draw together a largely disparate group of individuals in contemporary Taipei. 

Drawing from a great tradition of romantic comedies, in particular Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth, Jonás Trueba's latest film is a playfully reflexive and sparkling exploration of love, conversation and cinema.

Cantopop superstars Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung star as doomed lovers in Stanley Kwan's stunning combination of melodrama and ghost story. 

Marion Hänsel's adaptation of J.M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country, stars Jane Birkin in one of her best roles.

Magic and mystery abound in this striking debut feature by filmmaker Kaizo Hayashi which follows a private detective who is hired to find the missing daughter of a silent film actress.

Kaizo Hayashi's second feature plays as something of a companion piece to his first work To Sleep So as to Dream, and follows two brothers (Jinta and Wataru) who grow up as orphans in a traveling circus.

David Cronenberg's hallucinatory journey into a shadowy world of right-wing conspiracies, sadomasochistic sex games and bodily transformation.

The film chronicles the Kafkaesque predicament of a bumbling factory translator who is suspected of industrial espionage after sending an innocent telegram that is intercepted by a militant snoop.

Sent on a covert mission in Latin America in 1983, Vietnam veteran Eddie Guerrero's allegiance to the U.S. military begins to unravel as his growing awareness of his Latino heritage and his role in an imperial conflict leads him to identify with the people he is meant to oppose.

A young boy and his sister spend a summer at their grandparents’ house in the country while their mother recovers from an illness in Hou Hsiao-hsien's contemplative and profoundly moving coming-of-age tale.

A beloved favourite among Hou Hsiao-hsien’s early films, Dust in the Wind is an affecting and poignantly fatalistic story of first love.

Considered one of the best Chinese films about the cultural revolution, Hibiscus Town is a moving account of survival in the face of widespread social and political turmoil, told with clarity, compassion and insight. 

A resplendent centrepiece in Tian Zhuangzhuang’s loose trilogy about ethnic minorities, The Horse Thief portrays a young man being cast out from his clan and left to fend for himself in the mountains with his wife and child.

Probably the director’s most famous film, this impassioned drama follows the fate of a Beijing family and their acquaintances through the political and social upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s.

Orson Welles gives his final onscreen performance in independent filmmaker Henry Jaglom's tale of a puzzled film directors attempts to discover why life hasn't turned out like anyone expected.

Inspired by Thomas’ Heart (Toma no shinzo), a legendary manga by Moto Hagio, Shusuke Kaneko’s beguiling film explores teenage yearning, mystery and passion.

Atom Egoyan writes, directs and stars in this witty and devastating investigation of identity, memory and displacement – which here receives a rare 16mm screening.

The second part of Zhang Yimou's loose 'Red Trilogy' is a visually arresting drama of secret love starring Gong Li.

In Athina Rachel Tsangari's hallucinatory new film, a village with no name, in an undefined time and place, disappears. Townsman-turned-farmer Walter Thirsk and befuddled lord of the manor Charles Kent are childhood friends about to face an invasion from the outside world: the trauma of modernity.

Filled with the warm tropical light and lush greens of Martinique, shot on 16mm, multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s intoxicating feature debut imagines the life of Martinican writer and activist Suzanne Césaire.

Domingos and Neusia are a young couple from a small city in Mozambique. She goes to school, he has an underpaid job at a car wash. Yearning for a better life, Domingos sets on a journey through Mozambique, heading to the gold mines in the north of the country.

Believing that the end of the world is imminent, Coco, Tsumuji and Satoru, three patients of a mental asylum, escape their institution to seek the perfect picnic spot and watch the apocalypse.

McMullen’s painterly treatment of the Paris Commune recounts the events of those heady days – from the assassination of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico in 1867, through the Franco-Prussian War, to the crushing of the communards.

Screening on a rare 16mm print, Mark Rappaport’s film is at once a tribute and deconstruction of Jean Seberg’s life and the various studio systems that employed her. 

The sophomore feature by Chen Kaige, regarded as one of China’s most important directors and a leading filmmaker of the Fifth Generation of Chinese cinema, follows a group of military cadets on a gruelling training programme to prepare for a parade celebrating the 35th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic.

A landmark work from one of the leading figures of China’s fifth generation of filmmakers, Chen Kaige, King of the Children is set during the twilight of the Cultural Revolution and centres upon a young man who is sent from the city to the country for his scheduled tour of farm labour.

The debut feature from filmmakers David Siegel and Scott McGehee, Suture (1993) is a neo-noir thriller about two long-lost brothers whose identities become entangled.

This programme brings together three shorts by Hal Hartley, Jim Jarmusch and Neil Bartlett.

The debut film from Zhang Zeming, one of the lesser-known figures of China's famed 5th generation of filmmakers who revolutionised Chinese cinema in the 1980s, Swan Song spans three tumultuous decades to tell the haunting and melancholy tale of a Cantonese composer and his son.

Directed by gay activist and figure of the Toronto New Wave John Greyson, Zero Patience delivers a bold critique of the stigma surrounding the origins of HIV and of the myth of the patient zero.

A special 35mm double bill of Jim Jarmusch's existential tale of a mysterious loner journeying across Spain, preceded by perhaps his most beloved Coffee and Cigarettes short starring Iggy Pop and Tom Waits.

Released in 1997, the year of Hong Kong’s handover, Made in Hong Kong by Fruit Chan soon garnered critical praise for its raw and unflinching portrayal of urban disillusionment and youthful hopelessness.

As a closing event of the festival, we present a surprise screening of a cult film on 35mm.

This double-bill brings together works by two Ukrainian-born filmmakers with a keen interest in dreams and temporality.

Hong Sangsoo's latest film follows a young poet who, after dropping off his girlfriend at her parents' home, finds himself staying longer than expected.

Youths brings together a selection of 15 films that observe and explore ways of navigating, questioning, or disrupting reality as a young adult through the formation of groups and communities. 

A darkly funny symphony of family dysfunction following the estranged members of the Lunies family as they wrestle with chaotic private lives.

A programme of three short form works from the filmmaker rarely shown in the UK, ahead of the UK premiere presentation of Cent mille milliards (2024).

This double bill brings together two films that reflect on the question of identity and its formation, social and intimate relationships, projection, and the feeling of solitude conveyed through portraits of night workers. 

A special programme of six films celebrating the renowned work of the singular Argentine film collective.

After her boyfriend wins a free stay at a resort hotel, Laura finds herself becoming increasingly intrigued by the mysterious lives of her fellow guests.

A powerful observational documentary that reclaims a once-pejorative term used to dismiss Nigerian youth as apathetic and disengaged. 

Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale is the gravitational centre around which a constellation of characters and ideas orbit in Alejo Moguillansky's fascinatingly reflexive and playfully tangential exploration of creativity and its obstacles.

Alejo Moguillansky weaves together a Schubert sonata, Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar, and an unfinished scene from his film The Little Match Girl, in this playful and poignant exploration of the creative process and the inevitable passage of time

An exploration of the turbulence of contemporary Brazil through the prism of the Gasolineiras de Kebradas: fearless Chitara, her sister Léa and their all-female gang in the Sol Nascente favela on the edge of Brasília, who hijack a pipeline in order to sell oil to their community.

A strikingly realised stop-motion animation, invoking a magical forest world teeming with Indigenous history and legend, with an uncompromising environmental and anti-colonialist message from the director of My Life as a Courgette.

Painfully contemporary, Robert Bresson's penultimate film portrays a youth caught between a sense of aimlessness and a necessity to resist in the face of the state of the world. 

From the Oscar-winning director of 20 Days in Mariupol, Mstyslav Chernov’s latest film follows a Ukrainian platoon's mission: traverse a heavily fortified mile of forest to liberate a strategic village from Russian forces. 

Johanne's untold love and writing ignite familial conflict, revealing generational divides on love, sexuality, and the line between art and intimacy.

The history and politics of 19th century Argentina are unravelled with playful abandon in Mariano Llinás' exploration, analysis and recreation of an album by singer Ignacio Corsini.

The second part of Mariano Llinas' investigation into the music of Ignacio Corsini narrows in on the man behind the music and his roots in the Argentine countryside.

As Pavement reunites for their sold-out 2022 tour, their legacy takes on new dimensions through a genre-defying cinematic odyssey directed by Alex Ross Perry—melding biopic, stage musical, and museum exhibition into a hall-of-mirrors tribute that blurs the lines between fact and fiction.

My Beautiful Laundrette established the career of writer Hanif Kureishi, launched the cinema star that is Daniel Day-Lewis and catapulted director Stephen Frears into the spotlight. This culture-clash controversial comedy captured the tensions of multiculturalism and Thatcherism whilst its central gay inter racial relationship was both praised and criticised. 

Laura Citarella’s labyrinth of fictions is an enigmatic and liberating mystery that embodies El Pampero Cine’s inventive spirit whilst also forging new and intriguing directions.

An underground classic, Timeless Bottomless Bad Movie offers a unique and unprecedented variation on chaos, approximation, confusion and rebellion while sketching a feverish portrait of a group of runaways and young marginals as they roam the city of Seoul.

This double bill, sun-drenched and set on both sides of the Mediterranean, takes up the theme of the love encounter. Followed by DJ sets by Hegoa and Arapiente in the ICA Bar.

This double bill brings together two films directed respectively by Chantal Akerman and Jean-Pierre Gorin, both shot by cinematographer Babette Mangolte on opposite coasts of the United States, capturing fragments of life in peripheral and marginalised neighborhoods of New York and Los Angeles.

Shot on 16mm, Trương Minh Quý's quietly expressive and sensual drama centred upon two young coal miners is a hypnotic excavation of the memories and legacies of a nation.

Julien Colonna’s debut feature is a taut, sun-scorched crime drama that pulses with the tension of familial loyalty, territorial power, and adolescent awakening.

An entirely ordinary day on the beds ward of a surgical department. The nursing team is understaffed due to a shortage of personnel. Despite the hectic environment, Floria cares for her patients with expertise and full dedication.

Wang Bing’s Youth unfolds as an epic observational trilogy, offering a profound, intimate portrait of young textile workers in Zhili, a factory town 150 km from Shanghai.

At 38, BAFTA award-winning director Victoria Mapplebeck found herself single, pregnant, and broke. Shot over 20 years, Motherboard is a celebration of messy lives, capturing the pain, joy and comedy of raising her son Jim alone.

After a blind date, Marianne meets Tor on a ferry, provoking a curiosity about his approach to casual, spontaneous intimacy.

In this deeply personal and poetic non-fiction work, Portuguese filmmaker Catarina Ruivo embarks on a journey to resurrect the memory of her beloved grandmother, Júlia.

Walter Salles' Oscar-nominated road movie centres upon the emotional journey of a former school teacher, who writes letters for illiterate people, and a young boy, whose mother has just died, as they search for the father he never knew.

Jim Jarmusch's eccentric post-modern take on the crime thriller is an arresting combination of the irresistibly cool hitman movies of Jean-Pierre Melville and the philosophical underpinnings of samurai mythology.

Haunted by a tumultuous past, Vera has spent 20 years in refuge at a Belarusian monastery. Guided by her love of horses, she sets out on a path of redemption.

Blending heartache, humour and healing, Sorry, Baby is a bitingly-funny debut by director and actor Eva Victor.

Set in May of 2020, Ari Aster's latest film centres upon a stand-off between a small town sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and mayor (Pedro Pascal) which sparks a powder keg in the town of Eddington, New Mexico as neighbour is pitted against neighbour.

A haunting testament to the resilience of daily life under siege in Gaza. Captured through a filmmaker's video calls with Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona, these calls act as a powerful digital lifeline to the realities of war, resistance and survival.

Histories and fictions intertwine as Sofia Bohdanowicz concludes her Audrey Benac cycle with a captivating exploration of the life and work of Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow.

Two married men confront unexpected experiences that challenge their views on sexuality, identity, and gender — one through a same-sex encounter, the other through transformative dreams.

The debut feature film by Guadeloupean artist Malaury Eloi Paisley follows wanderers—prophets and seers—through Pointe-à-Pitre, a city both decaying and frozen in time. Followed by a Q&A with Malaury Eloi Paisley.

Serge Daney (1944–1992), one of the most influential critics of the 20th century, was described by Jean-Luc Godard as the end of criticism as he understood it. In conjunction with a new issue on Daney from the international film journal Sabzian, we present twelve films reflecting his philosophically rich, wide-ranging criticism, fueled by a passionate belief in a cinephilic internationalism.

Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet and Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog are two films that influenced Serge Daney’s understanding of cinema and the world early on, shaping the moral and aesthetic poles of his cinematic universe. Their influence would be felt throughout his career as a critic.

Haunted by a tumultuous past, Vera has spent 20 years in refuge at a Belarusian monastery. Guided by her love of horses, she sets out on a path of redemption.

First-time feature filmmaker Stéphane Ly-Cuong blends a heady cocktail of musical theatre, Vietnamese cuisine and second-generation tension to create a bitter-sweet musical comedy.

The debut feature from Slovenian director Urška Djukić is a tender portrayal, sensuously shot and beautifully scored, of the sexual awakening of a young chorister. 

Serge Daney in dialogue with Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar, who is engaged in archiving the photographic memory of his people. A meeting between two cultures and two different approaches to the image, a parable of North–South relations. Followed by a roundtable discussion featuring the programme curators, Arta Barzanji and Gerard-Jan Claes, joined by film scholars Pierre Eugène and Kate Ince, to discuss the enduring significance of his criticism.

Kenji Mizoguchi’s adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki, one of Japan’s greatest twentieth-century novelists, depicts a tragic love triangle in which ritual and repression entangle two sisters and one man in elegant torment. The film illuminates postwar familial hypocrisy with poignant, formal precision.

Described in various contexts as both an essay film and a landscape film, Too Early/Too Late is a diptych that juxtaposes a soundtrack reciting Friedrich Engels with images of landscapes from France and Egypt, investigating themes of history, land, and class struggle.

One of John Ford’s most lyrical, elegiac, and narratively sparse films, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon follows a cavalry captain (John Wayne) as he grapples with the ghosts of the past during his final mission before retirement.

D.W. Griffith’s French Revolution melodrama hurtles two orphaned sisters through crowds, reversals and brink-of-death reprieves. For Serge Daney, it’s the least frivolous Hollywood vision of 1789 and a test of cinema’s power to show rather than tell—made newly legible by the film’s late-night life on French television in the late 80s.

Set in pre-colonial Senegal, the film chronicles the titular Ceddo people's struggle to uphold their culture and traditions in the face of colonial and religious incursions from outside, as well as political intrigues from within. 

Blending folk legends, surrealist poetry, children’s adventure stories, and Hollywood horror movies, City of Pirates follows a nonlinear narrative about a sleepwalking virgin, a ten-year-old boy who claims to have raped and murdered his entire family, and the lone inhabitant of an island castle who shares his body with an imaginary sister.

On the shores of Odesa in Southern Ukraine lies the imposing Kuyalnik Sanatorium, a crumbling Soviet era health facility that’s seen better days. Over a summer season where the ever-dwindling guests come for the rejuvenating mud treatments and strange electroshock therapies, in search of love, healing and happiness.

The pageantry and brutality of bullfighting are drawn in stark relief in Albert Serra’s sublime portrait of the charismatic Peruvian-born torero, Andrés Roca Rey. 

Winner of the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes, the Dardenne brothers' social-realist drama follows five adolescent mothers living at a maternal support home in Belgium.

A story about doomed love between two people from different worlds and the impact in their lives. Based on the nineteenth-century novel of the same name by Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco, Manoel de Oliveira transforms the tale into a meditation on storytelling itself, where literary narration and filmic space constantly reshape one another.

A look at the last sixty days of Van Gogh’s life. After leaving the asylum, he settles in the home of Doctor Gachet, an art lover and patron. Van Gogh keeps painting amidst the conflicts with his brother Theo, the torments of his failing mental health, and an affair with Marguerite, his host’s daughter.

Four films from the film unit of the Division of Community Education in Puerto Rico.  Formed in 1947, the unit made scores of short films, poetic documentaries and neorealist fictions, from the late 1940s through the 1960s.

Awkward Moments present 90-minute performance-based mixed-media odyssey that reimagines the notion of Expanded Cinema as a queer dreamscape, transforming Cinema 1 into a shimmering space of fluid identity and radical expression. Featuring works from Awkward Moments & Norbert Schoerner, Zoë Marden, Eloise Fornieles & HOWL Vocal Ensemble, Grace Pickering & Sarah Nimmo, and Rowdy SS. 

Enigmatic and endlessly intriguing, the cinema of German filmmaker Angela Schanelec defies easy classification. For more than thirty years Schanelec has crafted a singular body of work that is both elliptical and philosophical. Drawing and departing from classical dramaturgy in almost equal measure, Schanelec's cinema, at its heart, is a cinema of being and becoming, a profound exploration of the very act of existing.

A deaf artist and new mother struggles to navigate a hearing-centric world, confronting the fragile balance between silence, sound, and belonging, in Eva Libertad’s debut feature.

Tom is a former pro tennis player now clinging to a job coaching hotel guests until the arrival of an English couple leads to something altogether darker. An intelligent, noirish thriller, stunningly shot against the sun-drenched volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands.

The city and the self, music and the human voice, being and time, this collection of early works by Angela Schanelec illuminate an artist who from the very beginning was already shaping the cinematographic form in her own image and voice.

A fascinating archival documentary exploring a utopian moment in the history of Puerto Rico, through the film unit of the Division of Community Education and the scores of short films it made in rural communities from the late 1940s through the 1960s.

22 extraordinary stories, from 22 Palestinian filmmakers, living through the unimaginable. 

The sixth instalment in Late Tapes - an exploration of fetishistic desire hand-picked by Harlan Whittingham and Helena Whittingham a.k.a. Content Warning, in collaboration with the Bishopsgate Institute’s UK Fetish Archive.

Hong Kong Film Festival UK returns for its third edition from 12–28 September in London, presenting reflective, boundary-shifting cinema from Hong Kong and the ESEA diaspora.

Ariane and Isabel are two half-sisters who love the same man, Christian, who wants to leave one to live with the other. Schanelec’s debut feature, an unsentimental rendition of the love triangle, wrestles with the uncertainties of desire and legibility.

Wounds healing, scars left behind. Years have gathered since collective trauma, and heads are simultaneously looking forwards while looking back. Reconciliation is a many-faced monster - is it just a typhoon, or just by chance that these are the colours chosen to represent it all? Alienated and rootless, we persist onwards, pondering between worlds. 

Condemned before it was seen, Jean-Luc Godard's contemporary retelling of the Annunciation and Nativity stories is a rhapsodic attempt to reconcile spirit and flesh, science and nature. 

Mimmi, a reticent teenager from Berlin, becomes pregnant on a school trip to Paris. Tracing the uneasy path to adulthood in her drift between the two cities, she remains inscrutable.

A screening and discussion of short films created by and with students from the Gaza encampments in the UK, presented in collaboration with the University of Warwick and Na'amod.

This double bill brings together Amy Halpern's Falling Lessons and Julie Dash's Illusions.

A taut political thriller and haunting character study, Ghost Trail follows a Syrian exile whose quiet life in Strasbourg unravels when he believes he’s found his former torturer. Followed by a Q&A with Jonathan Millet.

Set in a dystopian near-future Tokyo, Neo Sora’s striking debut feature follows a group of teenagers challenging the rigid expectations of society. Followed by a DJ set in the ICA Bar.

Valerie decides to stay in the city for summer, rhythmically and directionlessly making contact with friends, lovers and family, with both affection and unease.

Charming and irreverent, the films of Pia Frankenberg are animated by contagiously impulsive women who abandon bourgeois happiness and pursue the romance of new, improvised futures. From 1981 to 1992, the writer, director, and actor brought her jazzy spontaneity to German cinema, working to capture the spirit of the moment in Hamburg and Berlin.

A gang of poor youths in Madrid plan a heist to fund a bullfighting dream. Carlos Saura’s realist style marked a bold new voice in Spanish cinema, now restored after Franco-era censorship cut key scenes.

Pia Frankenberg’s most self-reflexive films include a swift, striking riposte to funding cuts, and a comedy in which a filmmaker reckons with her commitments to the feminist and activist politics of the ’60s and ’70s. Frankenberg stars in both, sparkling with mischief and self-deprecating charm. Followed by an in-person Q&A with Pia Frankenberg.

Set in a dystopian near-future Tokyo, Neo Sora’s striking debut feature follows a group of teenagers challenging the rigid expectations of society.

Hamid is part of a secret group pursuing the Syrian regime’s fugitive leaders. His mission takes him to France, on the trail of his former torturer, whom he must confront.

In Paris, beloved sex worker Rosa meets working-class Julien, sparking a romance that challenges her carefree life. Paul Vecchiali’s overlooked gem explores class and female sexuality, anchored by Marianne Basler’s magnetic performance.

Clara Law is often introduced as part of the ‘Hong Kong New Wave,’ although she refuses to be defined by territorial labels, a form of categorisation she continually challenges throughout her body of works. Born in Macau, raised in Hong Kong, and now based in Melbourne, Law—like many of her characters—is perpetually in motion, crossing national borders and cultural boundaries, making the sense of displacement in diaspora a recurring theme in both her life and work.

What was originally conceived as a graduation short at the National Film and Television School became Clara Law’s notable debut feature: a 16mm film that launched her cinema of the diaspora and offers a rare glimpse of her captivating onscreen performance.

From explosive quarrels to tentative reunions, Maurice Pialat's elliptical examination of the end of an affair between a married filmmaker and his younger, working-class lover is a magnetic and unflinching work of autobiography.

A car aficionado (Kurokawa Rikiya) travels from Japan to Australia to buy his dream car, a Citroën DS, and meets a mysterious blind girl (Rose Byrne) from the area. The two strangers embark on a journey where an intimacy develops between them as they confront past traumas along the way.

Made on the heels of the 1989 Tiananmen Crackdown, Clara Law reflects on the condition of voluntary exile in the diasporic Chinese community. Set to a sorrowful blend of Heng Chung folk music from Southern Taiwan and electric blues, the film pays attention to the forgotten aspiring migrants, whose hardships were not redeemed, forever longing for a home they cannot reclaim. 

Sophie, a photographer, comes to Marseille from Berlin by simple and spontaneous coincidence in an apartment swap with a French student. What could premise the beginning of a single coherent story ripples instead in the swirl of overlapping narratives.

Pia Frankenberg takes the screwball for an explosive spin in Hamburg, casting herself alongside punk musician Ian Dury – with whom she also recorded the original soundtrack. French New Wave cinematographer Raoul Coutard lends vital dynamism and colour to this combustible film.

Through role-play, magic, encounters with doppelgängers and meetings with an extensive range of scientists, visionaries and cultural inventors, Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian’s documentary offers an experimental vision and template for a future diaspora beyond Earth.

A gay man takes up a multitude of personas: an actor, a scientist, a teacher, an architect. His identity is constantly evolving - all impersonations, as he becomes his previous lover in the next casual encounter. He reimagines the lives of these intimate strangers, stringing together a new version of himself from their homes, spaces, and brief stories, wondering if this is the only way he can truly be himself.  

Women wander in search of adventure in Pia Frankenberg’s first and final films. Characters board a night train and drive into a newly reunified Berlin, as the writer-director finds forms of romance in female friendship. 

A family of artists holiday together in a house by the lake. Their estrangements and shifting perceptions unfurl lucently in Schanelec’s variation on domestic drama, loosely adapted from Chekov’s play The Seagull.

Ana Vaz is a pioneering Brazilian filmmaker and visual artist whose experimental works push the boundaries of cinema. This project marks the ICA’s first comprehensive exploration of Vaz’s work, presenting four carefully curated sessions that reflect her bold cinematic vision and invite audiences to reimagine their perception of time, space, and life.

Sixteen years after the defeat of their great enemy, a group of former revolutionaries must reunite when he resurfaces, to save one of their own’s daughter, in Paul Thomas Anderson's loose adaption from Thomas Pynchon's Vineland.

In the aftermath of a conspiracy-minded father’s unexpected death, his daughter receives his patent for an experimental healing device in this striking collaboration between filmmaker Courtney Stephens and actress Callie Hernandez.

A key member of iconic bands The Dirty Three and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, multi-instrumentalist and renowned film composer Warren Ellis has cut a brilliant and unorthodox figure in music for over three decades. This fly-on-the-wall documentary offers both a deeply personal insight into one artist’s life.

The first two sessions in this programme dedicated to the work of Ana Vaz narrow in on the influence of Vaz's hometown Brasília, Brazil's capital city, while also exploring the marks of colonialism and extractivism.

A scattered ensemble of four sets of strangers connect glancingly amid the arbitrariness and alienation of Paris Orly Airport, in Schanelec’s first film set fully outside of Berlin.

The second two sessions in this programme centred upon the work of Ana Vaz investigate Vaz's interest in both the craft of filmmaking and the human/nonhuman dimension of the world.

A filmmaker (voiced by Clara Law) first meets piano student Jeff in Australia. Three years later, they reunited in Hong Kong. Each begins their own nocturnal journey through the streets of their hometown. Jeff spends his sleepless nights wandering Hong Kong and is unexpectedly drawn into a stranger’s family affairs, while the filmmaker returns to her birthplace, Macau, and encounters a boy who reminds her of her missing brother.

An unforgiving vision of contemporary existence and the increasing materialism of society, Bresson's final film is perhaps his most brutal and despairing, as a forged bank note brings chaos and corruption to the lives of everyone it touches,

The 92-year-old previous nightclub dancer Coby Yee decides to get back on stage again after joining the senior dance troupe Grant Avenue Follies. Together they go on a tour for the last time, bridging once isolated Chinese communities in the US, Cuba and China.

The lives of two couples, marked by ache and ambiguity, interlace across leaps in time and dreams in Schanelec's enigmatic yet carefully constructed film about transition and unknowing. 

As we fail to address the climate crisis, activists cross the line into civil disobedience with chilling consequences for their lives and our protest rights. Presented with Client Earth, this screening is followed by a panel discussion witht the filmmaker, individuals appearing in the film, and Client Earth expert Kyle Lischak.

Dwayne Johnson plays legendary mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr, whose meteoric rise is haunted by addiction and personal strife in Benny Safdie's knock out sports biopic.

Harris Dickinson’s debut, featuring Frank Dilane in a career-defining role, is a lyrical portrait of youth, loss and fragile resilience though the experience of rough sleeper in London.

In this SXSW hit, the cult phenomenon of Rocky Horror is explored in depth like never before with an extraordinary cast of contributors.

One of the great works by the often overlooked Soviet filmmaker Boris Barnet, By the Bluest of Seas is a euphoric tale of love and friendship filled with lyrical imagery and bursting forth with desire, laughter and music.

Astrid’s thirteen-year-old son Philip returns after an unexplained absence of a week. Schanelec’s fourth consecutive collaboration with actress Maren Eggert, which earned her the 2018 Berlinale’s Best Director award, is a quietly precise study into a fracturing domestic life.

A brilliantly chilling film set in Prague during the Nazi occupation, telling the story of Karl Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrušínský), a professional cremator, for whom the political climate allows free rein to his increasingly deranged impulses for the 'salvation of the world'.

Music traces fate, loss and hope across continents and generations, in a transcendent reimagining of the Oedipus myth. 

Following a screening of one of the greatest films of the 21st century followed by a conversation between writers Philippa Snow and Emily LaBarge on the influence of the work of David Lynch on their new respective publications. 

The BFI London Film Festival in partnership with American Express returns to the ICA for its 69th edition running from 8 to 19 October.

Ernesto Martínez Bucio’s audacious debut finds five children deposited in the chaotic and ramshackle home of their eccentric and emotionally absent grandmother.

When her mother goes missing somewhere in Ireland, artist Myrid Carten returns from London to find her. Her search takes her into a feuding family, a contested house; and a history that threatens to take everyone down, including herself.

An unattributed nuclear missile is launched at the US, igniting a chain response to identify the responsible party and to decide on how the nation will respond, in Kathryn Bigelow's latest.

After leaving her pop idol group and starting a new life as an actress, Mima soon finds herself overwhelmed by a wave of provocative roles that go against her wishes. Before long, a string of murders begins to unfold, targeting those around her…

Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall star in the masterful new film from Ira Sachs, an intimate, richly cinematic rendering of a conversation between photographer Peter Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz.

Every second of Souleymane’s new life in France is precious. Having fled Guinea, his asylum interview looms. He powers through the streets of after dark Paris as a delivery rider, sleeps in hostels and prepares for his make-or-break appointment. 

Films in this programme consider how spaces hold the weight of what came before and the traces of what may emerge, moving through landscapes where memory, body and terrain shifts and transforms against time.

These films embody memories: some personal, others inherited or found. At times they’re mesmerising, yet fissures can appear in the depicted recollections. Subjectivity comes into focus. Established narratives are destabilised.

Paul Thomas Anderson's sprawling epic about family, faith and power, centres upon Daniel Day-Lewis's Machiavellian silver minor turned oil prospector, during California's turn-of-the-century petroleum boom. Selected by Tanoa Sasraku to accompany her exhibition Morale Patch.

Spanning nearly five decades, Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos' body of work is, in a truly homeric tradition, an epic journey through myth and history.

A striking fusion of documentary, drama, and myth, Angelopoulos debut feature is a haunting tragedy that draws from both Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy and film noir to reconstruct a crime and its consequences.

In a sedate Massachusetts suburb circa 1970, unemployed family man and amateur art thief J.B Mooney sets out on his first heist. With the museum cased and accomplices recruited, he has an airtight plan. 

Filmed on broken Bolex cameras and developed from a script of loose poetry, Levers traces a series of oneiric encounters in the Red River Valley following a sudden blackout after the unveiling of a new sculpture.

A sensitive documentary following Pulitzer winner Lynsey Addario, a conflict photographer balancing dangerous assignments with motherhood and deep personal sacrifice.

Theo Angelopoulos' second feature, and the first part of his trilogy of history, Days of '36 leans further into the procedural tendencies of his debut as he crafts a densely layered investigation into the machinations of political corruption.

The explosive new documentary from director Garo Berberian, charts the wild rise of dance music — from its birth in the gay black clubs of Chicago, through Manchester’s acid house revolution, the outlawed days of illegal raves and pirate radio.

A sweeping journey through Greek history and an intimate epic of love and death, Angelopoulos landmark film follows the travails of a travelling theatre troupe, as they are swept along by the bloody tides of history from Nazi occupation to civil war.

The true story that sparked an international movement, chronicling the harrowing case of Julieta, a woman falsely accused of infanticide, and Soledad Deza, the fearless lawyer who takes on the highly controversial case. 

The UK's music documentary film festival returns for its twelfth edition with a programme of four screenings.

In the late 1970s, Nash the Slash emerged as one of music’s true enigmas, an electric violinist and sonic alchemist blending classical finesse with punk rebellion. From scoring Un Chien Andalou live to mesmerizing audiences with his analog arsenal, Nash pushed the boundaries of performance and sound. 

After paying tribute to and introducing the photographic and pictorial work of Peter Christopherson (1955-2010) and John Balance (1962-2004) to a larger audience, founding members of the cult formation COIL, Timeless editions have had the duo’s filmed archives restored.

In the capital of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, Orsolya works as a bailiff. She has to evict a homeless guy from a cellar one day, which has disastrous results.

Two conspiracy obsessed young men kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet earth.

In 1936, as villages across Mandatory Palestine rise against British colonial rule, Yusuf drifts between his rural home and the restless energy of Jerusalem, looking for a future beyond the growing unrest. 

The programme traces the legacies of pioneering figures such as Gadalla Gubara, often described as the father of Sudanese cinema, through to urgent new works by contemporary filmmakers confronting the realities of revolution, displacement and social upheaval. Together, these films present Sudanese cinema as a living archive: one that resists erasure, foregrounds oral memory and visual poetry, and offers alternative visions of community, identity and futurity.

The second screening of Voices and Visions of Sudan – A Cinematic Reflection, curated by Sudanese film curator Talal Afifi once again looking to the cultural life of Sudan.

History is upended as a bourgeois New Years Eve party is thrown into disarray by the discovery of a rebel soldiers corpse seemingly from the Greek Civil War more than twenty-five years prior. An exorcism of the personal and collective ills of a nation, The Hunters is a haunting coda to Theo Angelopoulos' trilogy of history.

A fantastical exploration of performance, The Written Face drifts through the twilight between reality and dreams, drawing out the artistic philosophies of kabuki star Bando Tamasaburo V and other legends like Kazuo Ohno, captured with Daniel Schmid’s singular aesthetic vision.

With his fifth feature, Theo Angelopoulos turns to the dawn of the twentieth century for a politically charged fable centred upon the leader of a revolutionary commune, who causes an international incident when he takes a group of British aristocrats hostage.

Two short films screening as part of Voices and Visions of Sudan – A Cinematic Reflection, curated by Sudanese film curator Talal Afifi bringing together films that span generations, genres and geographies to illuminate the cultural life of Sudan at a moment of historic transformation.

The London Korean Film Festival (LKFF), organised by the Korean Cultural Centre UK (KCCUK) and supported by the Korean Film Council, returns to the ICA and more London screens for its 20th edition.  

Director Park Hyo-sun’s eight-year documentary blends her admiration for Meryl Streep with a feminist reflection on young Korean women’s struggles, dreams, and solidarity.

Commissioned for a television series on Europe's cultural capitals, Theo Angelopoulos' ode to the city of Athens draws from the poetry of George Seferis, the music of Manos Hadjidakis and the paintings of Tsarouchis. Preceded by Angelopoulos' first completed film Broadcast.

Estranged brothers reunite in a remote cabin, forced to confront their fractured past its lasting effects on them. A striking exploration of familial bonds marking the return to film of Daniel Day-Lewis.

Lost in her fears and fantasies, a young woman writes in a notebook. A young man finds this notebook on a train. Suddenly, they find themselves in the heart of a forest, in a nocturnal reality where dreams come to life in Isabel Pagliai’s first feature.

A thrilling “Manchurian Western” blending action, history, and genre spectacle with lasting impact.

The true story that sparked an international movement, chronicling the harrowing case of Julieta, a woman falsely accused of infanticide, and Soledad Deza, the fearless lawyer who takes on the highly controversial case. 

A special screening of Mark Cousins documentary which dives into the life and art of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, a visionary 20th-century artist who saw the natural world in extraordinary ways. Preceded by an introduction from Professor Annette Kuhn FBA.

A collaboration between Cecilia Mangini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, recording a vanishing female mourning ritual in Southern Italy meditating on culturally coded expressions of grief and collective memory, screens with Agnès Varda's imaginary biopic of Jane Birkin unveiling multiple Janes, both cultural icon and a woman. 

Three former K-pop idols reunite on Jeju Island, confronting past traumas, lost youth, and the scars of an exploitative industry in a tender journey.

In a fading coastal village, a bitter old fisherman harbors dark secrets, revealing a haunting portrait of loss, survival, and lives left behind.

A special members-only screening of the Egyptian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards.

Jang Man-min’s feature debut is a messy saga of blood, roots, family dysfunction and the transient nature of material things in our lives.

The first part of his acclaimed trilogy of silence, this tale of a former resistance fighter's return to his homeland after decades in exile, marked a key transition point in Angelopoulos' work from the collective histories that preceded it to the profoundly personal films that would follow.

After aging out of an orphanage, Se-jeong meets Eun-sook, an eccentric woman claiming to be her saviour — possibly a scammer, possibly her last hope.

A special members-only screening of the Italian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards.

This double bill brings together Mira Nair's India Cabaret and Gunvor Nelson's Take Off, two films about stripping and striptease.

Following his daughters wedding and his retirement from teaching, a beekeeper embarks upon a journey across Greece with his bees, just as his father and grandfather did before him. The second part of Angelopoulos' trilogy of silence, The Beekeeper is a haunting meditation on the necessity of letting go.

A programme of six short form works addressing memory and fractured realities. Screening as a part of the Irish Film Festival London.

From renowned filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, Die My Love is a visceral and uncompromising portrait of a woman engulfed by love and madness.

In a Beirut beauty clinic Bouba administers fillers and Botox, transforming frown lines and sometimes drawing blood. Conversations begin to thrum with memories of conflict past and looming, in artist Omar Mismar's fascinating debut film.

In the final years of Korea’s empire, a scholar’s son and unlikely allies form the first baseball team, capturing a nation’s shift toward modernity.

To Catch a Predator was a popular television show in the US designed to hunt down child predators and lure them to a film set, where they would be interviewed and  arrested. Predators explores its rise and staggering fall, and the world it helped create.

Having tried and failed to make a true crime documentary, filmmaker Charlie Shackleton tells the story of what might have been.

In this chilling thriller, fractured mother-daughter bonds fuel a tense mystery about identity, trauma, and the haunting return of a lost, dangerous child.

The annual festival’s 2025 edition showcases some of this year’s most anticipated new releases reflecting on Palestine.

Rediscovered MiniDV tapes from Gaza in 2001 send Kamal Aljafari on a road‑trip in search for a prison‑mate from 1989. He creates a cinematic reflection on memory and erasure, capturing a Gaza of the past and lives that may never be found again.

Two children set out on a long journey in the hope of finding the father they've never known. Accompanied by Eleni Karaindrou's sublime score, Landscape in the Mist is a profoundly moving road movie filled with the magic and horror of a fairytale.

A rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of Jean Renoir’s rehearsal with Gisèle Braunberger reveals his distinctive directorial method and a renowned Iranian New Wave filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf transforms an open casting call into a vivid human tapestry, in this dual screening.

A programme of six short form works addressing legacy and belonging. Screening as a part of the Irish Film Festival London.

A stylish, unsettling drama about identity, connection, and the cost of always being someone else, Peacock is selected as the Austrian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards.

A deeply affecting meditation on the contemporary history of the Balkans, the first part of Angelopoulos' Borders trilogy follows a television journalist who, while interviewing refugees in a border town, stumbles upon a man who may or may not be a famous politician who mysteriously disappeared many years prior.

Michael Moore's Palme d’Or-winning indictment of the George W. Bush administration focuses on the fear tactics used following the attacks of September 11th to push the United States into an unjust and unrelated war in Iraq. Selected by Tanoa Sasraku to accompany Morale Patch.

Japanese experimental filmmaker Kaori Oda uses her camera to navigate unfamiliar, often subterranean worlds. Her non-fiction films explore remote landscapes where human memories, desires, and cosmologies intertwine with the nonhuman, creating strikingly syncretic and sensory cinematic experiences.

A sonic and visual ode to the subterranean Okinawan gamas and their accumulated histories – both geological and human. 

Igor Bezinović weaves archive and interview to recount poet and military officer Gabriele D’Annunzio’s radical 1919 occupation of Fiume (Rijeka, Croatia), revealing the stirrings of European fascism in the wake of World War I.

Runaway Jeanne falls under the spell of Cristina, the enigmatic star of a film adaption of the Hans Christian Andersen story being shot in the studio where she has taken refuge. A dark, richly textured and deeply moving tale of longing and solitude.

Palme d’Or winner Julia Ducournau’s latest film offers a quiet revolution in genre filmmaking, borrowing from body horror, leading us through a family’s story of fear and pain, and their journey towards love. 

A special screening of Noujaïm’s trilogy exploring the haunting architecture of La Défense, Paris, where buried dreams, corporate isolation, and urban paranoia reveal the emotional cracks beneath the city’s surface, on the occasion of his new publication, INTERZONE.

A six-year journey across countries follows two women searching for their forcibly disappeared loved ones in Syria, transforming silence into a powerful call for justice and remembrance.

Peter Watkins scathing satire of the commodification of the counterculture is a fascinating, brutal anomaly, whose predictive gaze anticipated everything from reality TV to idol culture and fascistic pop stardom.

A sensorial non-fiction work shot along Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula that explores the eponymous geological sinkholes, themselves the remnants of a celestial collision. Screening as part of our focus on Kaori Oda.

In sunlit La Ciotat, Jean (Jean-Pierre Léaud), an actor haunted by the past, is drawn into a children’s filmmaking adventure. Born from a real-life workshop, The Lion Sleeps Tonight celebrates the joy and magic of collective creation.

A Greek-American filmmaker embarks upon an epic journey through the breadth of the Balkans, from desolate borders to cities under siege, in search of what is believed to be the very first film shot in the region.

Oda's desire to cross the threshold between different worlds is laid bare within these four personal short films.

Following Kharkiv-based street artist Gamlet Zinkivskyi on his journey to the recently liberated Ukrainian city of Izium, 60km from the frontline, where amid the ruins left by Russian occupation, he paints and meets locals who share their stories of survival, loss, and resilience.

The first ever realisation of a Godardian proposition inspired by the structure of William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms: the screening of his Made in USA and Two or Three Things I Know About Her as a single integrated work.

A haunting testament to the resilience of daily life under siege in Gaza. Captured through a filmmaker's video calls with a Palestinian photojournalist, these calls are a powerful digital lifeline to the realities of war, resistance and survival. 

An elegiac journey through memory, Theo Angelopoulos closes his Borders trilogy with the tale of an unexpected friendship between a dying poet and a young refugee.

A special programme of five films from the work of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Pinho, on the occasion of (and culminating in) the ICA UK release of I Only Rest in the Storm.

Colin is a quiet parking attendant, whose steady existence is disrupted by the exploration of pleasure, dependence, and his own limits, when he enters a dominant-submissive relationship with biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgård). 

Having tried and failed to make a true crime documentary, filmmaker Charlie Shackleton tells the story of what might have been.

From soundwaves to trembling ground and watchful skies, four powerful films trace how people bear witness in the shadow of violence. Through sonic archives, silent vibrations, and atmospheric unrest, ordinary people endure extraordinary hardship—holding fragments of life that refuse to be silenced.

Bab Sebta means 'The door of Ceuta' in Arabic, where migrants from the African continent who want to reach Europe converge. 

Using audio from actual phone conversations, Kaouther Ben Hania’s searing film recounts a day in January 2024 where workers at the Palestine Red Crescent Society  struggled to intervene in the preventable murder of Hind Rajab.

In the first part of his final (and ultimately unfinished) trilogy, Theo Angelopoulos draws even further into Greek history to trace a saga of forbidden love across generations. In many ways the culmination of Angelopoulos's work, The Weeping Meadow is an aching ode to love and music.

Three Filipino siblings, all domestic workers in Italy, reunite in their sister Lilia's inherited villa. As the night unfolds, buried grievances, shared memories, and long-held silences surface, testing their fragile bond.

A portrait of the daily lives of young people living in a new-built estate on the outskirts of Lisbon, made collectively with the help of a well-known young documentary filmmaker.

After the Soviet invasion of Prague, a young female photographer strives to break free from the constraints of Czechoslovak normalisation, embarking on a wild journey towards freedom. Klára Tasovská’s debut feature is a formally inventive and deeply personal film. 

The past and present finally meet in what would prove to be Theo Angelopoulos' final film. Intended as the middle section of a trilogy bridging Greece's history from post-WW1 to the present day, The Dust of Time centres upon an American filmmaker attempting to reconcile past and present while making a film about the journey of his mother.

An afternoon of short films - stories of people on the move that are confronted with the new reality their life has become. From difficult goodbyes, to unlikely encounters, this programme encompasses the best short fiction films we’ve seen this year.

In 2008, the growing tourism industry of Cape Verde froze. The building of resorts halted due to a shortage of sand. Tracing the shipping routes of the sand industry As Cidades e as Trocas highlights the physical and social transformations in the landscape produced in its exchanges.

To coincide with World AIDS Day, The Independent partners with the ICA to present Bel Trew's documentary exploring the real cost of Trump's aid cuts on HIV.

Mondays for Members returns with a special screening of The Things You Kill, Canada's entry for the 98th Academy Awards.

A three-night programme presenting two features, one featurette, and four shorts by Luc Moullet, whom Jean-Marie Straub called 'the most important filmmaker of the French post-Godard generation.'

This programme presents two products of Moullet’s proud Alpine heritage: his early adventure comedy Les Contrebandières, brimming with pre-68 anti-authoritarian energy, and the late short Le Litre de lait, a favourite of the director himself, which recreates an ominous episode from Moullet’s youth.

Following the success of its inaugural edition in 2024, the Armenian Film Festival London is proud to return to the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) for its second edition. 

The 1980s saw Moullet experiment with short forms. Barres and Essai d’ouverture, two works built around increasingly absurd variations on a single scenario, are among the director’s most enduringly popular films, while the featurette Les Sièges de l’Alcazar lovingly pokes fun at the cinephilia of 1950s Paris.

The story of the legendary crooner Charles Aznavour: son of refugees who fled the Armenian Genocide, once a small, poor boy with a veiled voice.

A fearless, Palme d’Or winning, tour-de-force from cinematic luminary Jafar Panahi. Both urgently political and deeply humane, this new moral classic confronts truth and uncertainty, revenge and mercy, head-on.

Filmmaker Tamara Stepanyan embarks on an evocative journey through the forgotten world of Armenian cinema. Sparked by a dialogue with her father, renowned Armenian actor Vigen Stepanyan.

Sergio, an environmental engineer from Portugal, travels to Guinea-Bissau for an impact report. There, lonely in the heat, he encounters Diara and Guilermhe and begins to approach the post-colonial and capitalist forces shaping their lives.

Before beginning the production of The Colour of Pomegranates, Sergei Parajanov crafted this exquisite short, honouring nineteenth-century Armenian portraitist Hakob Hovnatanyan. Blending fragments of paintings, staged tableaux, and scenes of Tbilisi life, it stands as a poetic tribute from one visionary artist to another.

A screening of four British Armenian short films exploring identity, religion, landscape and deep memory.

Departing from the premise of a Cecil B. DeMille silent melodrama, Le Prestige de la mort sees Moullet play himself in a hilarious examination of the lengths a lowly filmmaker will go for recognition (and remuneration). It is here presented alongside Le Fantôme de Longstaff, an arresting adaptation of a Henry James short story that reveals a facility for melodrama rarely explored elsewhere in Moullet’s oeuvre. 

In a working-class Los Angeles neighbourhood reeling from decades of violence in a forgotten corner of Venice Beach, a struggling single mum tries to steer her teenage son Freddy away from a veteran gangster who has become a father figure to him. 

On New York's Upper West Side, actress Carol Kane lives with her 98-year-old mother Joy, an active music teacher, former dancer, and lifelong Francophile. In this intimate short 16mm documentary, the two are filmed for an afternoon of music and friends and stories — a lifetime in a day.

A small mountain community in Canada is devastated when a school bus accident leaves more than a dozen of its children dead in the 4k restoration UK Premiere of Atom Egoyan's unforgettable 1997 film.

A young employee in a UK dead letter office reads a mangled treatise from an author who claims to be Mott, an angel from the future, sent to earth on a holy mission. 

A selection of literary adaptations by Godard and Alexandre Astruc, including Godard’s first fiction film, Une femme coquette (d’après Maupassant) (A Flirtatious Woman (Based on Maupassant), 1956). His subsequent planned remake of this early short culminated in Masculin féminin (1966).

Werner Herzog's spectacular documentary about ecological disaster and the Gulf War. Selected by Tanoa Sasraku to accompany her solo exhibition.

Nikola is a farmer grappling with the harsh realities of new government policies. When his family leaves, Nikola takes a job as a landfill attendant, where he encounters the injured white stork Silyan and an unlikely bond forms between man and animal. 

A sense of otherworldly threat pervades French-Moroccan director Sofia Alaoui’s intriguing philosophical sci-fi Animalia, an extension of her Sundance Grand Jury-winning 2020 short, So What If the Goats Die.

Nikola is a farmer grappling with the harsh realities of new government policies. When his family leaves, Nikola takes a job as a landfill attendant, where he encounters the injured white stork Silyan and an unlikely bond forms between man and animal. 

Cinema Tehran presents a rarely seen and long banned masterpiece from pre-revolutionary Iran. Loosely based on Chekhov’s A Lady’s Story, an 18-year-old woman becomes obsessed with a stranger in Parviz Sayyad’s Dead End.

The London Community Video Archive takes over for a Late Tapes screening of Pout Issue One, London’s groundbreaking queer video magazine which first launched in 1992.

A timeless masterpiece of love and yearning, L’Atalante was the only full-length film made by Jean Vigo before his tragic early death. The film is now considered to be one of cinema’s very greatest works.

Cinema Tehran presents Bahram Beyzayi’s first feature which helped usher in the Iranian New Wave. When he takes a job as a schoolteacher in a new neighborhood, the hapless intellectual Mr. Hekmati finds that he is a fish out of water. 

A special screening of Keith Gordon’s psychological World War II drama adapted from William Wharton’s autobiographical novel.

An evening celebrating Diane Keaton, screening her directorial debut, Heaven (1987).

Peter Watkins' seminal pseudo-documentary sees countercultural dissenters thrown into a brutal California desert tribunal, exposing authoritarian overreach and state-sanctioned violence in America, as filmed in newsreel style by a European crew.

A double bill that pairs famed street photographer Ho Fan and Sun Po-ling’s experimental feature with Tiffany Sia’s short film that reworks mid-20th-century Hong Kong travelogue footage. 

An inspirational insight into the spectacular art at the center of this annual celebration, Burning Man: Art on Fire, directed by BAFTA winner Gerald Fox, follows the unpredictable journey of the artists who defy reason to bring their massive installations and sculptures to the punishing Nevada desert.

For a fifth consecutive December, a heartbroken Noel returns to New York City to work the night shift at a sidewalk Christmas tree lot. As he slowly spirals into despair, he comes to the aid of a mysterious young woman in the park.

Magaluf Gallery presents Chill Fatalism, a focused programme of recent works by New York-based filmmaker Ken Kobland. Shown as a continuous loop