index

Otto lives in a remote village, where he spends a lot of time with his best friends. But there’s someone he misses dearly. His boyfriend, who is a professional dancer, lives hundreds of miles away. Otto finds comfort in his lover’s movements and uses his own body to bridge the distance between them.

A sleeping man dreams of a city at dusk. He is every angelic lover, caught off guard. The film goes in and out of his pulsating erotic dream: heated up, he dreams of landscapes, even of becoming the landscape.

Elephant is, without question, Alan Clarke’s bleakest film: a compilation of eighteen murders on the streets of Belfast, without explanatory narrative. After each killing, the camera dwells on the bodies, forcing the viewer to confront the brutality of their deaths.

Set in a post-apocalyptic near-future, La Jetée tells the story of an unnamed man whose vivid childhood recollections make him the perfect guinea pig for an experiment in time travel. After a lengthy period of conditioning, he is sent back in time, where he falls in love with a woman whom he once saw on a pier.

Incident by a Bank is based on true facts and stages a surreal, failed bank robbery that the filmmaker himself witnessed in 2006, in central Stockholm. By constantly keeping the viewer at a sterile distance from the main action, Östlund slowly shifts the focus from the robbery to those witnessing the situation from a safe distance.

A man finds himself haunted by a mysterious black tower in London that appears to follow him wherever he goes. The Black Tower is an example of a film that succesfully plays with emotions and the language of film.

Confused about German bureaucracy and questioning her sexuality, Hoda, an Iranian asylum seeker in Berlin, finds herself hooked on Magdalena, who promised to ensure her asylum by marrying her. Due to changes in Magdalena’s private life, her decision to marry Hoda becomes more complex.

During his heyday, Buster Keaton was also known as The Great Stone Face. The American comedian is best known for his silent films, which focus on physical comedy and his deadpan facial expressions.

One Week is the first independent film Buster Keaton released himself, full of new stunts in and around houses and on ladders.

In Zero for Conduct, four rebellious pupils plan a revolt to take over the school. The film was first shown in Paris in 1933, but shocked so many viewers that it was subsequently banned from screens until the end of World War II.

In Jacques Rozier’s second short film, Rentrée des classes, a little boy throws his school bag into the river on the first day of school, which leads to a thrilling adventure.

In So Can I, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami combines live-action and animation. While two schoolboys watch animated animals (such as jumping kangaroos and swimming fish) on TV, one boy says, “I can do that too,” and then imitates the actions.

Almost a decade after her in 2022 crowned “best film of all time”, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman made the twelve-minute I’m Hungry, I’m Cold. In it, two young chain-smoking Brussels girls run away from home, to Paris.

The work of French activist, novelist, and essayist Jean Genet was considered controversial in the forties and fifties, because of its explicit homosexuality. Genet made only one film in his entire life, but Un Chant d’amour went on to inspire both David Bowie and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Yes, Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett also made a film once, archetypically titled Film. A man tries to escape the gaze of an all-seeing eye. The disorienting camerawork comes from Oscar winner Boris Kaufman, whose brothers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman created the legendary self-reflective masterpiece Man With a Movie Camera (1929).

In his contribution to the omnibus film RO.GO.PA.G (1963), Pier Paolo Pasolini depicts Orson Welles making a film about the crucifixion of Jesus, while he, the cast, and the crew behave quite unholy. La Ricotta is a short, apocalyptic tirade against the conventions of filmmaking and the unchristian coldness of contemporary Christianity.

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first major film introduced their grippingly sparse, elliptical style to international audiences. Not Reconciled brought an intense sense of the present to this narrative of three architects reckoning with their family’s traumatic wartime history.

In Ever is Over All, Pipilotti Rist juxtaposes the field and its flowers with her magically powerful wand, and transposes acts of aggression and annihilation into benevolent and creative ones. An anarchic young woman gleefully breaks windows.

A rich boy is playing alone with his enormous collection of expensive toys. When he looks out the window, he sees a poor boy on the street, also playing alone. They duel, each showing off their toys in a bid to outdo the other. Satyajit Ray called Two a ‘film fable’.

The War Game presents a fictional scenario concerning the consequences of an explosion in Kent following the escalation of an East-West conflict. The BBC withdrew its support, stating that “the effect of the film is considered too horrific for television broadcast”. The film had a significant impact on the growing campaign for nuclear disarmament.

A pristine white bathroom soon becomes a site of crimson-stained shaving carnage in Martin Scorsese’s daring student film, a potent and disturbing allegory for the horrors of the Vietnam War. What starts out as a pleasant morning soon goes horribly wrong, turning into a bloody spectacle of self-mutilation.

Filmed over a single unbroken take, this work brings together slice-of-life vignettes. On a busy street corner, three young men have a conversation over food. Suddenly, a motorcycle crash occurs nearby. As the crowd clears, a young boy performs street tricks and a beer girl plies her trade.

Manuel Muñoz Rivas turns the daily passage of a ferry on a Spanish river into a ritual crossing of sacred beauty, as the passengers’ souls wander through suspended narrations of everyday life.

Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman was arguably the first surrealist film ever made. The film tells the story of a clergyman who falls madly in love with a beautiful woman, but must defeat an equally eager rival.

Two young men in a pickup truck, from different parts of the world, discover each other through the use of a camera. As the camera lenses change, a landscape of rice fields and a cinema crew get into the frame. The camera then reshoots the road and the men, as if we were witnessing a film rehearsal.

The black-and-white science fiction film from 1902 has since become a canonical work. A Trip to the Moon was hugely popular upon its original release and used animation and visual effects that were very innovative at the time.

Wasp follows a single mother too young to have four children, and too poor to feed them. This Oscar-winning short film was shot in Dartford, a south-east London working-class suburb, where filmmaker Andrea Arnold grew up.

A red balloon with a mind of its own follows a little boy around the streets of Paris. This beguiling allegory of innocence and transcendence is the only short film ever to win an Oscar for best original screenplay.

The Vampires of Poverty is an action film masquerading as a documentary about filmmakers who exploit poverty for profit, with a touch of black humour, but most of all a scathing critique against ‘misery porn’ and the opportunism of those filmmakers who make ‘socio-political’ films in the Third World to make money and win prizes in Europe.

At the outskirts of a city, a group of people stands around a lorry. Naked men, women, and children are herded in through the rear door of the vehicle. Once the door is locked, a gentleman takes a hose and connects it from the exhaust pipe to the lorry’s interior.

In the dream-like narrative of At Land, a woman, played by filmmaker Maya Deren herself, is washed up on a beach and goes on a strange journey, encountering other versions of herself. Deren described the film as about the struggle to maintain one’s personal identity.

In the Oscar-winning The Wrong Trousers, the kind-hearted, cheese-loving bachelor and inventor Wallace rents out his loyal and intelligent anthropomorphic dog’s bedroom to a penguin.

On a lonely planet, a musical is enacted in a modern marketplace. The employees of various commercial venues, portrayed as anthropomorphic animals, cope with boredom and existential anxiety by performing cheerful showtunes.

A girl from a shantytown travels to the city to become an itinerant newspaper vendor. Mambety’s richly textured view of urban life fuses fiction and documentary, displaying the rampant poverty and endemic misogyny in the modernising capital of Dakar.

Norman McLaren applies the principles used to animate drawings or puppets to animate live actors. Neighbours is a parable about two people who come to blows over the possession of a flower. The political context shifts depending on the viewers’ personal positions.

Ousmane Sembène’s first film uses a mixture of documentary and fiction techniques to tell the story of a young cart-driver in Dakar. The Wagoner illustrates the continent’s poverty, showing that independence has not solved the problems of its people.

In a shopping mall, two women sing about their favourite items but are quickly pursued by a masked cannibal who is intent on forcing his way to their love. Possibly in Michigan is an operatic fairy tale of cannibalism and dread in America.

This bittersweet film from Jean Renoir, based on a story by Guy de Maupassant, is a tenderly comic idyll about a city family’s picnic in the French countryside and the romancing of the mother and grown daughter by two local men.

llusions is a gripping critique of cinema’s power to shape perception, exploring the myth of racial identity. Julie Dash’s drama shows the instrumentalisation of Hollywood during wartime.

A little girl is taken on a mind-bending tour of her distant future. An element of childhood whimsy is integral to balancing out the film’s dark absurdism, paving the way for its core theme: life is precious, and the sadness permeating our day-to-day is a reminder to cherish it.

In a quarry, two boys become embroiled in a seemingly innocent power game with Mother Nature as their only spectator.

Maryam Tafakory creates an intimate inner world that moves between the concrete and the abstract. Layers of found and original footage are superimposed to fill in some of the cracks, the deletions, the limits of representation. Mast-del is a love song that would never pass through censorship.