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

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

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.