Strange Object

The cruelty of confinement and the struggle for liberation contained within in hand-drawn animation and archival footage.

Abstracted footage and audio of bombs dropping on Biafra in 1967 set against a speech by leader Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, illustrates the ironies of post-colonial warfare.

A new formation of history that includes the fantastical as well as the political in the context of Britain’s decolonial process in Kenya and during the Cold War.

Important events like Tunisia’s Independence Day might be in the past, but we may need to access them in counter-intuitive ways.

An imagining of lost films from the Nigerian Film Unit archive, with distinctive soundscapes, juxtaposed with images of the abandoned interior and exteriors of the building that housed it.

Re-worked footage from an unfinished film by Senegalese director Mamadou Johnny Sekka forms a re-examination of The Jackson 5’s 1974 trip to Dakar.

The director of a documentary about British funk pioneers Cymande joins the band at BFI Southbank to talk about the film.

Plotting world domination, Devil Doctor Fu-Manchu steals plans for a new aero-torpedo in this earliest surviving thrill-a-minute serial instalment.

Filmmakers Jane Giles and Ali Catterall discuss their documentary Scala!!!, revisiting the legendary and inspirational cinema venue and some of the most notorious films that screened there.

Long thought lost, this Powell-directed promotional short for a veteran’s charity was only rediscovered in 2003.

A poignant, stirring letter from a recently deceased pilot to his mother is read by John Gielgud.

Former Bristol Poet Laureate, Miles Chambers reads a poem specially commissioned for the 75th anniversary of the NHS.