Discoveries from United Kingdom World Cinema

A young criminal kidnaps a couple's young son and then blackmails them into committing his crime instead of asking for a ransom.

During the 15th century reign of France's King Louis XI, a young Scottish man is sent by his English Lord to woo a French lady on his behalf. The plan goes awry when the young man falls in love with her. Based on the classic novel by Sir Walter Scott.

In a mid-19th century Essex country house, a young governess for two children becomes convinced that the house and grounds are haunted by ghosts and that the children are being possessed.

An asocial and enigmatic office clerk refuses to do his work, leaving it up to his boss to decide what should be done with him.

Sensuous and desirable, Carol Forrest has always attracted the attention of men. Expert in the art of manipulation and control she married an older man, loving only his vast wealth and continued to amuse herself with indiscreet affairs. But when neighbour Mark Kendrick lets slip that her husband intends cutting her out of his will Carol concentrates all her attentions on the unsuspecting Kendrick, obtaining his help to dispose of this irritating obstacle.

An extraordinary journey through the material that makes up our habitat: concrete and its ancestor, stone. Victor Kossakovsky raises a fundamental question: how do we inhabit the world of tomorrow?

Peggy Martin, daughter of a wealthy American businessman, persuades her father to buy a haunted Scottish castle from Donald Glourie. As the castle is dismantled and transported to Florida, its ghost tags along. Donald and Peggy fall in love, but the restless apparition proves to unwelcome, and they must find a way to appease the kilt-wearing spirit.

After seeing her husband fail in fighting a battle to keep his factory open, a manageress loses her job in a disagreement with the manager over sexual harassment of her staff. She accepts the advice of her father and joins his son, a left-wing organizer, and takes her plight to the union.

The meeting of the quiet Helen North and the charismatic Carla on a beautiful Greek island leads to tragic consequences.

A man framed for murder escapes from prison during a flood and helps a young woman in distress.

An aging hypnotist creates a device that allows the user to control the mind of another person, but his wife abuses its power by manipulating a younger man to commit evil acts.

A small village in Portugal, Águas-Altas, is being sued by a Spanish multinational corporation because the village hosts a website that uses the same name as an international brand of mineral water. A judicial battle for website begins, that quickly turned in to a media circus. Thus the residents of this small village, who are not even sure what the internet is, are forced defend their website and their villages honour.

France, 1815. Sharpe seems to have settled down for life on a tranquil French farm with his new partner Lucille when the sudden news of Napoleon's return from exile compels him to go back to the army to fight in the great Battle of Waterloo. He joins the staff of Wellington's ally, the Prince of Orange. Once again reunited with the Chosen Men, Sharpe abandons his inept commander to organise the defence of the British key positions on the farm of La Haie Sainte and plays a courageous and important role in securing one of Britain's most famous victories.

Joe Newman, a naturalised Briton, is telephoned by his German father, whom he believed long dead, at the same time as a funeral is taking place in Bavaria - with his father's name on the coffin. His investigation in Bavaria reveals startling facts and the obstruction he meets makes him suspect foul play.

After a genial spirit shows the benevolent Ebenezer Blackadder visions of his unscrupulous ancestors, he resolves to mend his generous ways.

A chronological account of the influential late 1970s English rock band.

The Prince's Trust celebrates it's 10th anniversary in 1986 with a concert at Wembley Arena featuring a variety of rock stars and attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales.

Told from the POV of Black Beauty himself, his birth and perception of humans are explored, but his first owner, a boy named Joe, is his most memorable.

A wealthy blind man is determined to build a cricket pavilion as a memorial to his dead son, who was killed in battle in World War II. Not long before the dedication ceremony is to be held, the son shows up; it turns out that he wasn't killed in battle but deserted, and has become a blackmailer and a killer. He wants to get some money to "start a new life", but his blind father senses that something is wrong and sets out to find out what's going on.

Francis Ashby, a senior Oxford don on holiday alone in the Alps, meets holidaying American Caroline and her companion Elinor, the blossoming Irish-American girl she adopted many years before. Ashby finds he enjoys their company, particularly that of Elinor, and both the women are drawn to him. Back at Oxford he is nevertheless taken aback when they arrive unannounced. Women are not allowed in the College grounds, let alone the rooms. Indeed any liaison, however innocent, is frowned on by the upstanding Fellows.

Backstage before a performance, a French actor recalls his time in Madagascar during World War II, when he secretly ran a Resistance radio station under the watch of a collaborationist police chief. His story unfolds in flashback, revealing espionage, deception, and divided loyalties within the French ranks. Made for Britain’s Ministry of Information, this 1944 French-language propaganda short satirizes Vichy opportunism and wartime hypocrisy, and was shelved for decades before its release in 1993.

The remarkable story of iconoclastic fashion designer Vivienne Westwood as she fights to maintain her brand’s integrity, her principles and her legacy.

Despite their age difference, Lesbian couple Olivia and Alex are very much in love. But as the question of pregnancy rears its head and their neighbour John befriends them, they both start making some truly disastrous decisions.

A teacher's world is torn apart when his wife and children are brutally murdered at the hands of a ruthless gang. Left for dead and with no one to turn to, he takes matters into his own hands and hits the streets in search of justice.

Following his ruin in the latest banking crisis, a self-made millionaire reluctantly re-unites with his estranged freewheeling brother to re-open the abandoned fish and chip shop they shared in their youth.

A love left unsaid on the football field, a third invite to a high-rise tête-à-tête, a fast-approaching farewell and a friendship that evolves into something complicated. Lose yourself in these five stories from France that are handled with grace, maturity and a tender touch. The 5 short films are: 9th Floor to the Right [9ème étage droite] (2022); Hugo: 6:30 [Hugo : 18h30] (2020); Cary & James (2023); For the Love of the Game [Pour l'amour du jeu] (2023); Youssou & Malek [Youssou et Malek] (2022).

Out-of-control teens across America were sent to a therapy camp in the harsh Utah desert. The conditions were brutal, but the staff were even worse.

If the conflict in Bosnia has become something of a forgotten war, it's not for the want of trying from the immensely powerful BBC film Warriors, the story of five young soldiers and their harrowing experiences in the region.

In an unprecedented portrait of King Charles III, Finding Harmony: A King's Vision provides intimate insight into His Majesty's passionate quest to reunite humanity with nature. Academy Award-winner Kate Winslet narrates this journey through The King's Foundation's vital work.

Captain Vinka Kovalenko defects from Russia, but not for political reasons. She defects because she feels discriminated against as a woman. Captain Chuck Lockwood gets the order to show her the bright side of capitalism, while she tries to convince him of the superiority of communism. Naturally, they fall in love, but there's still the KGB, which doesn't like the idea of having a defected Russian officer running around in London.

After his father is killed in an altercation with drunken thugs, Salah's world is plunged into darkness. Forced into running the family kebab shop alone, Salah struggles to manage the increasingly rowdy night life and when a fight with an angry customer goes fatally wrong, he finds himself with a dead body on his hands. With no faith in the authorities Salah disposes of the body in the one place he knows best… the kebabs.

Romantic comedy/short film from 1994, starring Alan Cumming and Minnie Driver.

This documentary explores the legacy of one of the most notorious British sitcoms of all time. Launching alternative comedy onto our screens, the show made household names of its performers and writers and proved to be a huge influence, despite the BBC reportedly being baffled by what they'd commissioned back in 1982. Never before had a flagship comedy show contained so much violence, depravity and anarchy - it was a shot across the bow to mainstream comedians that things would never be the same again.

Two friends brainstorm the worst possible sentence to tweet from one of their famous husband's accounts as revenge for cheating. It's an assassination attempt done with words rather than bullets. But things don’t quite go as expected.

After returning from a year-long Moon mission, Cassie, a NASA botanist, finds herself in a remote cabin in the woods, where her estranged twin sister, Stella, a former NASA architect, has found a new life with climate activist Bryan. Old wounds resurface as the sisters attempt to pick up the pieces of the rivalry that broke them apart.

It’s The Italian Job so obviously, I head to Kent in England for the race of a lifetime. But first I have to get ready. So, it’s the Fiorano test track in Italy where I spend a while not getting ready at all. I try the gym but it’s all rubbish so instead, I decide to compare Ferrari’s 458 Italia and the limited edition 599 GTO. On paper, that doesn’t seem fair. But in reality….

In the Sahara desert, a sandstorm batters a deserted drilling station. A security patrolman battles through the high winds to investigate why all contact with the station has been lost. Originally built for gas exploration, and then abandoned, the site had recently been taken over by a multi-national research team intent on drilling deeper into the earth’s crust than ever before.

A group of down-and-out accountants mutiny against their bosses and sail their office building onto the high seas in search of a pirate's life.

Otto Baxter, a filmmaker with Down's Syndrome, directs and stars in this musical horror-comedy short based on his life, set in Victorian London.

When a tidemark of poisoned crabs & lobsters devastate a small North East fishing town, veteran fisherman Stan Rennie becomes the unlikeliest of activists. A wry David and Goliath story, told with gallows humour and a broad Teesside accent, about the grief of navigating a world which has suddenly, inexplicably changed forever.

Despite its suggestive title, this multi-part Danish omnibus film is not a work of exploitation. Instead, it presents 20 different short films (back-to-back) on the general theme of Danish women, directed by filmmakers including Krzysztof Zanussi, Monika Treut, Gustav Hamos, David Blair, Vibeke Vogel, Dusan Makavejev, Morten Skallerud and Lars Norgaard. Some dramatic vignettes mix with other comedic ones, but all are offbeat and experimental. The picture includes one animated sequence (by Norgaard).

Told through the eyes of Casper Harrison. The Rapture is a fast paced mystery thriller where good and evil collide in the quest to possess the most holiest of artifacts, The Spear Of Destiny.

For want of a nail a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe... a young man's life is almost lost, which is exactly what this film is all about: a man barely twenty who wants desperately to pull out of London's drug world by taking a job as a waiter in a 'normal' restaurant. But to do this he must come up with a "sensible" pair of shoes, an item that his homeless meanderings hasn't provided him.

When well-off aircraft designer Denning finds his daughter's current boyfriend is a nasty character he tries to buy him off, ending up hitting him and causing his death when he falls. Instead of calling the police he dumps the body in a lonely spot on the road to the North, making it look like a hit-and-run accident. Weeks later there is still no report of the body being found, and Denning starts to go to pieces. When he lets his wife into his secret the two start making enquiries, possibly making things worse.

Emily Delahunty is an eccentric British romance novelist who lives in Umbria in central Italy. One day while travelling, the train she is on is bombed by terrorists. After she wakes up in a hospital, she invites three of the other survivors of the disaster to stay at her Italian villa for recuperation. Of these are The General, a retired British Army veteran, Werner, a young German man, and Aimee, a young American girl who has now become mute after her parents were both killed in the explosion.

Leonard Moore is a once chart-topping pop star now lounge singer at a mid-budget Canary Island hotel. One night he meets Shirley, another lost soul with whom he shares an instant connection. But Shirley’s husband is a dangerous man and soon the new couple’s burgeoning romance is thrust into a spiral of paranoia, suspense and violence.

Soon to be married lawyer Kate Beckenham has landed the case of a lifetime. Her courtroom opponent turns out to be the charming Jack Sullivan, who has never lost a single case.

A portrait of singer-songwriter Shawn Mendes' life, chronicling the past few years of his rise and journey.

Noble Moroccan Othello finds his life with beautiful, fiercely loyal Desdemona thrown tragically out of balance when secretly jealous, scheming confidante Iago begins an insidious campaign of lies and treachery.

A talking Terrier with impressive computer skills teams up with two youngsters to stop a million dollars from falling into the wrong hands.

Judith, an uptight widow, is appalled when her daughter Lily quits law school to move into a commune of hippie misfits who live according to the behavioural principles of the bonobo monkey, a species famous for its 'make love not war' philosophy.

From groundbreaking human cloning research to a scandalous downfall, this documentary tells the captivating story of Korea's most notorious scientist.

Too insecure to approach the girl of his dreams, Danny takes a job at the local multiplex where she works

A veteran bank robber and his sidekicks plan a heist that goes awry.

A heartbroken guy throws caution to the wind and goes to an orgy.

In the Bezonians social club in North London, A group of down and outs scheme, plot and dream of becoming rich and breaking out of the monotony of their dreary and financially impotent lives.

Haunted by the death of her young daughter, a distraught woman develops an all-consuming obsession with a girl she believes is her reincarnated child.

On a quest to prove his competency, an inept sound recordist finds himself entangled in a nautical prophecy on the spectral island of Pincer Point.

We've all had "one of those days" - when nothing seems to go right, when life just seems to be dealing you one poor hand after another. Unfortunately for Howard Whittam, that day is Judgment Day.