Land of Silence and Darkness

Writer Nadia M Oliva tracks the development of the melodrama genre and how it plays out across film, TV and online.

Immerse yourself in the work of Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti - icons of the Mexican Renaissance.

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's essay film commemorating pilot Amy Johnson's pioneering solo flight to Australia in 1930.

Rhianna Dhillon selects her favourite Coming of Age films available now on BFI Player.

Neglected since its release in 1971, Bushman follows a Nigerian student in San Francisco but is interrupted by the arrest of its leading man.

Cinema history demonstrates swimming pools are awash with symbolic possibility – artist Justin Anderson shares some tips on how to film them

Fitzcarraldo tells the story of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, a fortune hunter who dreams of bringing opera to the Peruvian jungle.

Fassbinder’s international breakthrough, this unconventional love story combines lucid social analysis with devastating emotional power.

Fassbinder's visual and verbal extravaganza about a successful but lonely fashion designer who falls in love with a beautiful younger woman.

Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog’s final collaboration is a typically wild and adventurous story of a bandit who trains an army of women to topple a slave-trading king

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

After his mother wakes from a coma, a man goes to great lengths to pretend East Germany still exists in this wonderfully bittersweet tragicomedy.

An 18th-century Bavarian community falls apart when the local glassmaker dies, in Werner Herzog's mesmerising drama for which he famously directed his actors under hypnosis.

Herzog’s account of the historical character who captivated 19th-century Nuremberg after emerging from isolation after 16 years in a cellar.

Fitzcarraldo tells the story of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, a fortune hunter who dreams of bringing opera to the Peruvian jungle.

Werner Herzog’s moving portrait of a record-breaking ski jumper.

This early masterpiece from Werner Herzog stars Klaus Kinski as a power-crazed explorer in sixteenth-century South America who leads a band of conquistadors through the Amazon in search of El Dorado.

English language version of Herzog’s stimulating take on the Dracula story starring Klaus Kinski, with echoes of Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu.

An ungainly cockney chauffeur navigates the seedy streets of London, gradually falling for the elegant and mysterious prostitute who is his passenger.

Reviled upon its release, now reclaimed as a cult classic - one can only submit to the trash-tastic delights of Paul Verhoeven's erotic disasterpiece.

Saoirse Ronan gives a bracing performance as a young recovering alcoholic returning home to Orkney in this moving adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s memoir.

Alan Parker’s elliptical, ethereal adaptation of the acclaimed, ‘unfilmable’ novel by William Wharton, about a boy who dreams of flying.

Anora director Sean Baker's visionary portrait of life in America’s underbelly, featuring an Oscar-nominated turn from Willem Dafoe.

A salesman becomes obsessed by an icy prostitute against the backdrop of a hellish Paris, in this arthouse erotica from Walerian Borowczyk (The Beast)