Rotherham up to Date

Visionary filmmaker Penny Woolcock explores half a century of British urban life using films digitised for Britain on Film, the archive project from BFI and its partner archives.

The tattered wallpaper of part demolished housing contrasts with gleaming new tower blocks. Ladywood in Birmingham may be on the up but what about the forgotten people?

Sheffield stands in as 'Smokedale', an industrial Everytown, in this stirring call for "new schools, new hospitals, new roads, new life", after WWII.

Coventry prepares to rise from the ashes of WWII in this docu-drama written by Dylan Thomas.

A bright and breezy promotional tour of Brum's original mega-mall.

Residents of Barnet and Stockton-on-Tees are the lucky beneficiaries of a government scheme to remedy Britain’s housing problem.

Edwardian workers react to the camera at one of Rotherham's major employers.

Naturalist Michael Clegg retraces the paths of merchants who travelled from Cheshire to Rotherham with their goods.

A genuinely fascinating businessman, with workman’s hands, an old battered Austin, still labouring at 77, and keeping many a church going.

This is an absorbing film of a Remembrance Day service and procession in Rotherham, unusual in being held in wartime, and made more poignant for being so.

Quieter than a diesel bus, more manoeuvrable than a tram. The Guy trolley bus is the answer to all your transport problems and they're 'perfectly safe up to 40mph'.

An intriguing and enigmatic early short film of photographers taking themselves as subjects having discovered the joys of moving image.

A teenage boy trails a group of young hustlers, thinking one of them may be his anonymous hook-up for the night.

Amongst the young members of a swimming team, the onset of puberty brings unwanted challenges.

When Little Jia is asked to read his essay about how he spent Women's Day with his mother out loud in class, he has to hide the sad truth that only his friend Dong knows.

China in the early 1990s. By day, Chen Shi is a man employed in a textile workshop. At night, she is a woman in a red dress. One evening, she falls in love with a man she meets at a dance hall.

Two teenage boys in a Malaysian boarding school wrestle with the challenges of bullying and identity.

A Chinese-American restaurant worker falls in love with an 18th century Qing dynasty god, who visits him at night and leads him on a journey of sexual awakening and self-discovery.