Most Popular World Cinema 2023

An epic journey of friendship and self-discovery set against a magnificent and breath-taking Italian landscape, winner of the 2022 Cannes Jury Prize.

A neglected girl lives a joyful summer in Colm Bairéad's Academy Award-nominated debut that combines outstanding beauty and heart-wrenching performances.

Jean-Jacques Annaud's powerful, intimate, and sensual adaptation of the best-selling novel by Marguerite Duras.

You may never look at film the same way again after watching this illuminating journey, which deconstructs the male gaze in cinema.

A lavish trip to the Turkish Riviera goes horribly awry in this disturbing tale of power, exploitation and complicity from the writer of Border.

The joint winner of the Cannes Jury Prize and Academy Award-nominated, EO is a strangely wonderful tale where the dark and light of humanity is laid bare.

She just did what! Attention-seeking Signe will do anything to keep the focus on herself, in this wildly demented comedy.

From writer-director Cécile Ducrocq comes a bold, provocative drama starring an electric Laure Calamy (Call My Agent!) as a single mother and sex worker in a desperate situation.

A newly promoted detective is assigned to a young woman’s chilling murder in this deeply arresting crime thriller based on true events.

Chantal Akerman's magnificent epic of experimental cinema offering a feminist perspective on recurrent events of everyday life.

Denis Ménochet (Peter von Kant) stars as a small-town farmer whose idyllic lifestyle turns into a living nightmare, in this rivetingly structured, slow-burn thriller.

An unnervingly brilliant portrait of the ways in which the Pinochet dictatorship realised its brute force and pervasive influence, from debut director Manuela Martelli. Winner of the 2022 BFI London Film Festival First Feature Competition.

A couple find their relationship in a precarious state following a tragedy, in Kōji Fukada’s subtle portrait of the frailty of human relationships.

David Bowie’s image and music gives brooding energy to this tale of a junkie sex-worker in 70s Berlin.

Panic, a petty gangster, is caught up in Township riots in this cult classic crime drama, the first anti-Apartheid film shot guerilla style on the streets of Soweto.

Impeccably styled and unflinchingly grim, this darkly humorous tale of a pop star past his prime finds Ulrich Seidl at his audacious best.

Dalva is a 12-year-old girl who dresses and acts like a woman, blinded by her father's pernicious affections. After being taken into care, she has to learn to live like a child again, in this delicate, compassionate and powerful drama.

The Best Film winner at the 2013 BFI London Film Festival is an exquisitely shot, moving drama about a Polish nun exploring her family past, from UK-based director Pawel Pawlikowski.

Unravelling the vast cinematic contribution and elusive personal mystique of one of cinema's great masters, Jean-Luc Godard.

Director Claire Denis gives a wry account of an artist’s search for love, in this witty black comedy starring Juliette Binoche.

A fisherman’s son is offered a place at a prestigious Islamic school in Cairo and finds himself drawn into a religious and political power struggle.