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.

From a distinctive period in a filmmaker or actor’s career to the varied cinematographic interpretations of a great novelist's work, this continuing series offers an opportunity to draw connections across mediums and to narrow in on the details.

From 20–25 October, The Independent marks its 40th anniversary at the ICA with Celebrating Free Thinkers, a festival of screenings, conversations and cultural events, bringing together distinctive voices from across film and culture. 

One of the most important filmmakers to emerge from Japan’s post-war era, Imamura’s unruly, inventive, and often anthropological approach to cinema is singular in the medium’s history. 

A projectionist navigating his own precarious living situation finds himself at the centre of an unconventional nocturnal community in Ramiro Sonzini and Ezequiel Salinas' luminous tale of friendship.

This double bill brings together two outliers from Imamura’s time as a director-for-hire for Nikkatsu, a minor comedy centred upon a henpecked husband's extra-marital affair and a profoundly tender exploration of the attempts of four orphaned children to make their way in the world, in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

In a Japanese coastal town still haunted by the 2011 tsunami, a taxi becomes a moving confession booth. Over the course of one night, a series of conversations between drivers and their passengers reveal how those who survived live with the dead.

Exploring communities of pleasure by envisioning the revolutionary potential of sex and desire beyond the confines of the bedroom. Across fiction, documentary, artist film and porn, these films frame desire at its most expansive, each an entry into an erotic world harnessing hedonism to smother social taboos.

Éditions 1989 celebrates the launch of the second edition of Who Are You Dorothy Dean? When Dorothy Dean (1932–1987) entered the 1960s New York underground scene, she quickly became one of its key figures, starring in six of Andy Warhol's films. The evening will feature a special 40-minute excerpt from Andy Warhol's Prison (1965), followed by a Q&A with author Anaïs Ngbanzo.

Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a sceptical film crew to document her every move. What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss. From boundary-pushing directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim comes You Can See Everything.

La Bola Negra tells the interconnected stories of three men in three different eras. Three lives intimately linked by sexuality and desire, pain and inheritance, and one of Federico García Lorca´s last, unfinished works.

Zhang Yimou’s masterpiece Raise the Red Lantern has been fully restored in 4K. A sumptuous period piece set in 1920s China, we follow 19-year-old Songlian, depiced by Gong Li, who becomes a concubine of a powerful lord and is forced to compete with his three wives for the privileges gained.

Censored for over half a century, Ken Russell’s film returns in a landmark director’s cut reconstruction that reveals the full power of his original vision.

A time capsule of the 1978 Nova Convention, bringing together never-before-seen footage recovered from Howard Brookner’s archive, featuring William S. Burroughs, Philip Glass, Frank Zappa, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson and other cultural radicals at the explosive crossroads of punk, performance, literature and the avant-garde.

A story of two married couples – a laid-off worker and his spouse and a documentary filmmaker and her spouse – crossing paths to film a documentary and facing their different lives and hidden desires. 

The new offering from Oscar-winner Pawel Pawlikowski takes place in 1949, just as the novelist Thomas Mann returns to Germany from exile, having opposed Hitler’s regime.

A woman (Juliette Lewis) swaps bodies with a chair, and everyone likes her better as a chair in a surreal, deadpan comedy from director Amanda Kramer.

Set against the backdrop of mass protests in Paris, Case 137 follows Stéphanie, a meticulous internal affairs investigator working on the case of a teenager severely wounded by police fire. As she searches for the truth her inquiry collides with institutional resistance and pressure mounts as the case takes a personal turn when she discovers the victim is from her hometown.

Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

In 1993, invited by David Lynch to come up with a low-budget genre movie, Michael Almereyda (Tesla, Experimenter, Hamlet) came up with a moody, postmodern reimagining of the Dracula myth which draws inspiration from Dracula’s Daughter (1936) and André Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja. 

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.

Join us to celebrate the publication of Erika Balsom's The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture with the London premiere of James Benning's little boy (2025). The screening will be accompanied by an introduction by Erika Balsom. 

Join us to celebrate the publication of Erika Balsom's The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture with a panel discussion between Erika Balsom, Lola Lemke, Maria Palacios Cruz, and Jonathan Romney. 

Jean-Luc Godard’s remarkable three final works, which all take the form of poetic script–trailers for unrealised virtual films and were released posthumously following his assisted suicide in 2022. To be followed by a discussion with the producer of two of the films, Mitra Farahani.

A visceral encounter with Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid’s pioneering videos, 1984–1997, revealing Ljubljana’s underground energy through aesthetic rupture, cultural experimentation, and social transformation – from socialist Yugoslavia to Slovenia in the 1990s.

Often pushing the limits of cinematic realism by incorporating elliptical, nested narratives, with forms that spiral towards the fantastical and absurd, the films of Mexican filmmaker Nicolás Pereda are sly and granular explorations of power, grounded in an acute attention to the body’s most minute gestures and to the tensions that gather beneath dialogue, while revealing how thoroughly everyday reality is itself shaped by the contours of performance.

Lost, Banned, Reclaimed brings together four films that were forgotten, lost or suppressed: Iranian, Armenian, Egyptian and Kazakh, each a radical aesthetic anomaly, each lost in the cracks of history or banned, and each eventually restored and brought to international audiences. These are films that, in some sense, should not exist, or rather, films that history made little effort to preserve. Visually distinctive and rooted in the cultures of their regions, they show what can disappear when unique cinematic languages are interrupted or prevented from circulating.

“Computer programmer/beekeeper Jacob gets a “television” implanted in his brain by a race of telekinetic bees, which causes him to experience severe hallucinations.” So goes the setup for David Blair’s unclassifiable 1991 work Wax, Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, but this description only encapsulates a portion of the hyper-digressive, decidedly peculiar contents of this singular, visually arresting film.

Found in the realm between awe and fear, these films lay bare the ineffable through an engagement with the philosophical sublime. Bridging cultures, eras, and genres, the programme celebrates that which escapes the limits of human comprehension.

Director and activist, Christian Ghazi (1934-2013) began his career making dozens of commissioned films in Lebanon, mostly centered on the struggles of resistance fighters, refugee camp dwellers, tobacco farmers, and factory workers. One Hundred Faces for a Single Day (Mi'at Wajeh Li Yawm Wahed) (1972), Ghazi’s experimental 16mm film which combines documentary footage with abstract sequences, weaving together disjointed plots and overlapping storylines. 

Sonic Cinema and the Japan Foundation present the films of Montreal-based artist Daïchi Saïto, projected from his personal 35mm prints. A rare encounter with a singular voice in artisanal film practice, this programme highlights Saïto’s skill in bridging metaphysical concepts with sensory experience.

A karate-trained, motorcycle-riding, wild man from the Jura, Jean-François Stévenin was a singular presence in French cinema. This series presents the UK public premieres of Stévenin’s inimitable films alongside the American films that shaped his unique sensibility and three of his greatest performances in films by other directors.

Doc’n Roll Film Festival returns to London this autumn for its 13th edition, bringing another exciting selection of music documentaries to cinemas across the city from 22 October to 8 November. Fiercely independent and rooted in a DIY spirit, Doc’n Roll celebrates the artists, outsiders, scenes and stories that shape music culture, spanning genres, generations and musical movements from around the world.

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 21st edition.  

The annual festival’s 2026 edition brings together some of this year’s most compelling new films, from UK premieres and Oscar-nominated titles to archival footage and retrospective screenings, creating a vital space to showcase the richness of Palestinian life through lived experience and everyday realities.

Fashion in Film Festival returns to the ICA for its 20th anniversary, celebrating the collaborators and guests who have brought it to life over the past two decades.