Looking for Love

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

Dash’s groundbreaking Daughters of the Dust remains urgent and poetic and continues to resonate, inspiring Beyoncé’s iconic visual album Lemonade.

Welsh-raised, Zambian-born Rungano Nyoni delivers a dazzling debut with this darkly satirical fairy tale about a little girl accused of being a witch.

Kenyan couple Samuel and Alex remain committed to each other despite the danger and hardship facing them in Peter Murimi’s moving documentary portrait.

Palme d'Or nominated film about a former rapper who takes a teaching job at a cultural centre in a working-class neighbourhood in Casablanca.

A philosophy professor and an artist reach a crisis point in their marriage, in Kathleen Collins’ groundbreaking masterpiece.

Menelik Shabazz’s pioneering first feature traces the emotional and political growth of a young black couple in Thatcher’s London.

Menelik Shabazz (Burning an Illusion) shines a light on the music genre often dubbed ‘romantic reggae’; a uniquely black British sound that developed in the late 70s and 80s against a backdrop of riots, racial tension and sound systems.

Sumptuous historical drama starring Isabelle Adjani and Daniel Auteuil; a thunderous yarn full of dastardly plots, familial hatred and perverse desire

1980s borstal drama – billed as the female Scum – featuring Amanda York and Kathy Burke as inmates in a ruthless women’s prison.

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.