A continuing series spotlighting new films that expand the possibilities of the medium and provide a vision for its future.

A continuing series of in-depth retrospectives exploring the work of cinema's great artists, both past and present.

The pageantry and brutality of bullfighting are drawn in stark relief in Albert Serra’s sublime portrait of the charismatic Peruvian-born torero, Andrés Roca Rey. 

After leaving her pop idol group and starting a new life as an actress, Mima soon finds herself overwhelmed by a wave of provocative roles that go against her wishes. Before long, a string of murders begins to unfold, targeting those around her…

Spanning nearly five decades, Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos' body of work is, in a truly homeric tradition, an epic journey through myth and history.

In a sedate Massachusetts suburb circa 1970, unemployed family man and amateur art thief J.B Mooney sets out on his first heist. With the museum cased and accomplices recruited, he has an airtight plan. 

Filmed on broken Bolex cameras and developed from a script of loose poetry, Levers traces a series of oneiric encounters in the Red River Valley following a sudden blackout after the unveiling of a new sculpture.

A sensitive documentary following Pulitzer winner Lynsey Addario, a conflict photographer balancing dangerous assignments with motherhood and deep personal sacrifice.

The UK's music documentary film festival returns for its twelfth edition with a programme of four screenings.

In the capital of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, Orsolya works as a bailiff. She has to evict a homeless guy from a cellar one day, which has disastrous results.

Two conspiracy obsessed young men kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet earth.

In 1936, as villages across Mandatory Palestine rise against British colonial rule, Yusuf drifts between his rural home and the restless energy of Jerusalem, looking for a future beyond the growing unrest. 

The programme traces the legacies of pioneering figures such as Gadalla Gubara, often described as the father of Sudanese cinema, through to urgent new works by contemporary filmmakers confronting the realities of revolution, displacement and social upheaval. Together, these films present Sudanese cinema as a living archive: one that resists erasure, foregrounds oral memory and visual poetry, and offers alternative visions of community, identity and futurity.

The second screening of Voices and Visions of Sudan – A Cinematic Reflection, curated by Sudanese film curator Talal Afifi once again looking to the cultural life of Sudan.

History is upended as a bourgeois New Years Eve party is thrown into disarray by the discovery of a rebel soldiers corpse seemingly from the Greek Civil War more than twenty-five years prior. An exorcism of the personal and collective ills of a nation, The Hunters is a haunting coda to Theo Angelopoulos' trilogy of history.

A fantastical exploration of performance, The Written Face drifts through the twilight between reality and dreams, drawing out the artistic philosophies of kabuki star Bando Tamasaburo V and other legends like Kazuo Ohno, captured with Daniel Schmid’s singular aesthetic vision.

With his fifth feature, Theo Angelopoulos turns to the dawn of the twentieth century for a politically charged fable centred upon the leader of a revolutionary commune, who causes an international incident when he takes a group of British aristocrats hostage.

Two short films screening as part of Voices and Visions of Sudan – A Cinematic Reflection, curated by Sudanese film curator Talal Afifi bringing together films that span generations, genres and geographies to illuminate the cultural life of Sudan at a moment of historic transformation.

The London Korean Film Festival (LKFF), organised by the Korean Cultural Centre UK (KCCUK) and supported by the Korean Film Council, returns to the ICA and more London screens for its 20th edition.  

Director Park Hyo-sun’s eight-year documentary blends her admiration for Meryl Streep with a feminist reflection on young Korean women’s struggles, dreams, and solidarity.

Commissioned for a television series on Europe's cultural capitals, Theo Angelopoulos' ode to the city of Athens draws from the poetry of George Seferis, the music of Manos Hadjidakis and the paintings of Tsarouchis. Preceded by Angelopoulos' first completed film Broadcast.

Estranged brothers reunite in a remote cabin, forced to confront their fractured past its lasting effects on them. A striking exploration of familial bonds marking the return to film of Daniel Day-Lewis.

Lost in her fears and fantasies, a young woman writes in a notebook. A young man finds this notebook on a train. Suddenly, they find themselves in the heart of a forest, in a nocturnal reality where dreams come to life in Isabel Pagliai’s first feature.

A thrilling “Manchurian Western” blending action, history, and genre spectacle with lasting impact.

The true story that sparked an international movement, chronicling the harrowing case of Julieta, a woman falsely accused of infanticide, and Soledad Deza, the fearless lawyer who takes on the highly controversial case. 

A special screening of Mark Cousins documentary which dives into the life and art of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, a visionary 20th-century artist who saw the natural world in extraordinary ways. Preceded by an introduction from Professor Annette Kuhn FBA.

A collaboration between Cecilia Mangini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, recording a vanishing female mourning ritual in Southern Italy meditating on culturally coded expressions of grief and collective memory, screens with Agnès Varda's imaginary biopic of Jane Birkin unveiling multiple Janes, both cultural icon and a woman. 

Three former K-pop idols reunite on Jeju Island, confronting past traumas, lost youth, and the scars of an exploitative industry in a tender journey.

In a fading coastal village, a bitter old fisherman harbors dark secrets, revealing a haunting portrait of loss, survival, and lives left behind.

A special members-only screening of the Egyptian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards.

Jang Man-min’s feature debut is a messy saga of blood, roots, family dysfunction and the transient nature of material things in our lives.

The first part of his acclaimed trilogy of silence, this tale of a former resistance fighter's return to his homeland after decades in exile, marked a key transition point in Angelopoulos' work from the collective histories that preceded it to the profoundly personal films that would follow.

After aging out of an orphanage, Se-jeong meets Eun-sook, an eccentric woman claiming to be her saviour — possibly a scammer, possibly her last hope.

A special members-only screening of the Italian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards.

This double bill brings together Mira Nair's India Cabaret and Gunvor Nelson's Take Off, two films about stripping and striptease.

Following his daughters wedding and his retirement from teaching, a beekeeper embarks upon a journey across Greece with his bees, just as his father and grandfather did before him. The second part of Angelopoulos' trilogy of silence, The Beekeeper is a haunting meditation on the necessity of letting go.

A programme of six short form works addressing memory and fractured realities. Screening as a part of the Irish Film Festival London.

From renowned filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, Die My Love is a visceral and uncompromising portrait of a woman engulfed by love and madness.

In a Beirut beauty clinic Bouba administers fillers and Botox, transforming frown lines and sometimes drawing blood. Conversations begin to thrum with memories of conflict past and looming, in artist Omar Mismar's fascinating debut film.

In the final years of Korea’s empire, a scholar’s son and unlikely allies form the first baseball team, capturing a nation’s shift toward modernity.

To Catch a Predator was a popular television show in the US designed to hunt down child predators and lure them to a film set, where they would be interviewed and  arrested. Predators explores its rise and staggering fall, and the world it helped create.

Having tried and failed to make a true crime documentary, filmmaker Charlie Shackleton tells the story of what might have been.

In this chilling thriller, fractured mother-daughter bonds fuel a tense mystery about identity, trauma, and the haunting return of a lost, dangerous child.

The annual festival’s 2025 edition showcases some of this year’s most anticipated new releases reflecting on Palestine.

Rediscovered MiniDV tapes from Gaza in 2001 send Kamal Aljafari on a road‑trip in search for a prison‑mate from 1989. He creates a cinematic reflection on memory and erasure, capturing a Gaza of the past and lives that may never be found again.

Two children set out on a long journey in the hope of finding the father they've never known. Accompanied by Eleni Karaindrou's sublime score, Landscape in the Mist is a profoundly moving road movie filled with the magic and horror of a fairytale.

A rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of Jean Renoir’s rehearsal with Gisèle Braunberger reveals his distinctive directorial method and a renowned Iranian New Wave filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf transforms an open casting call into a vivid human tapestry, in this dual screening.

A programme of six short form works addressing legacy and belonging. Screening as a part of the Irish Film Festival London.

A stylish, unsettling drama about identity, connection, and the cost of always being someone else, Peacock is selected as the Austrian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards.

A deeply affecting meditation on the contemporary history of the Balkans, the first part of Angelopoulos' Borders trilogy follows a television journalist who, while interviewing refugees in a border town, stumbles upon a man who may or may not be a famous politician who mysteriously disappeared many years prior.

Michael Moore's Palme d’Or-winning indictment of the George W. Bush administration focuses on the fear tactics used following the attacks of September 11th to push the United States into an unjust and unrelated war in Iraq. Selected by Tanoa Sasraku to accompany Morale Patch.

Japanese experimental filmmaker Kaori Oda uses her camera to navigate unfamiliar, often subterranean worlds. Her non-fiction films explore remote landscapes where human memories, desires, and cosmologies intertwine with the nonhuman, creating strikingly syncretic and sensory cinematic experiences.

A sonic and visual ode to the subterranean Okinawan gamas and their accumulated histories – both geological and human. 

Igor Bezinović weaves archive and interview to recount poet and military officer Gabriele D’Annunzio’s radical 1919 occupation of Fiume (Rijeka, Croatia), revealing the stirrings of European fascism in the wake of World War I.

Runaway Jeanne falls under the spell of Cristina, the enigmatic star of a film adaption of the Hans Christian Andersen story being shot in the studio where she has taken refuge. A dark, richly textured and deeply moving tale of longing and solitude.

Palme d’Or winner Julia Ducournau’s latest film offers a quiet revolution in genre filmmaking, borrowing from body horror, leading us through a family’s story of fear and pain, and their journey towards love. 

A special screening of Noujaïm’s trilogy exploring the haunting architecture of La Défense, Paris, where buried dreams, corporate isolation, and urban paranoia reveal the emotional cracks beneath the city’s surface, on the occasion of his new publication, INTERZONE.

A six-year journey across countries follows two women searching for their forcibly disappeared loved ones in Syria, transforming silence into a powerful call for justice and remembrance.

Peter Watkins scathing satire of the commodification of the counterculture is a fascinating, brutal anomaly, whose predictive gaze anticipated everything from reality TV to idol culture and fascistic pop stardom.

A sensorial non-fiction work shot along Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula that explores the eponymous geological sinkholes, themselves the remnants of a celestial collision. Screening as part of our focus on Kaori Oda.

In sunlit La Ciotat, Jean (Jean-Pierre Léaud), an actor haunted by the past, is drawn into a children’s filmmaking adventure. Born from a real-life workshop, The Lion Sleeps Tonight celebrates the joy and magic of collective creation.

A Greek-American filmmaker embarks upon an epic journey through the breadth of the Balkans, from desolate borders to cities under siege, in search of what is believed to be the very first film shot in the region.

Oda's desire to cross the threshold between different worlds is laid bare within these four personal short films.

Following Kharkiv-based street artist Gamlet Zinkivskyi on his journey to the recently liberated Ukrainian city of Izium, 60km from the frontline, where amid the ruins left by Russian occupation, he paints and meets locals who share their stories of survival, loss, and resilience.

The first ever realisation of a Godardian proposition inspired by the structure of William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms: the screening of his Made in USA and Two or Three Things I Know About Her as a single integrated work.

A haunting testament to the resilience of daily life under siege in Gaza. Captured through a filmmaker's video calls with a Palestinian photojournalist, these calls are a powerful digital lifeline to the realities of war, resistance and survival. 

An elegiac journey through memory, Theo Angelopoulos closes his Borders trilogy with the tale of an unexpected friendship between a dying poet and a young refugee.

A special programme of five films from the work of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Pinho, on the occasion of (and culminating in) the ICA UK release of I Only Rest in the Storm.

Colin is a quiet parking attendant, whose steady existence is disrupted by the exploration of pleasure, dependence, and his own limits, when he enters a dominant-submissive relationship with biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgård). 

Having tried and failed to make a true crime documentary, filmmaker Charlie Shackleton tells the story of what might have been.

From soundwaves to trembling ground and watchful skies, four powerful films trace how people bear witness in the shadow of violence. Through sonic archives, silent vibrations, and atmospheric unrest, ordinary people endure extraordinary hardship—holding fragments of life that refuse to be silenced.

Bab Sebta means 'The door of Ceuta' in Arabic, where migrants from the African continent who want to reach Europe converge. 

Using audio from actual phone conversations, Kaouther Ben Hania’s searing film recounts a day in January 2024 where workers at the Palestine Red Crescent Society  struggled to intervene in the preventable murder of Hind Rajab.

In the first part of his final (and ultimately unfinished) trilogy, Theo Angelopoulos draws even further into Greek history to trace a saga of forbidden love across generations. In many ways the culmination of Angelopoulos's work, The Weeping Meadow is an aching ode to love and music.

Three Filipino siblings, all domestic workers in Italy, reunite in their sister Lilia's inherited villa. As the night unfolds, buried grievances, shared memories, and long-held silences surface, testing their fragile bond.

A portrait of the daily lives of young people living in a new-built estate on the outskirts of Lisbon, made collectively with the help of a well-known young documentary filmmaker.

After the Soviet invasion of Prague, a young female photographer strives to break free from the constraints of Czechoslovak normalisation, embarking on a wild journey towards freedom. Klára Tasovská’s debut feature is a formally inventive and deeply personal film. 

The past and present finally meet in what would prove to be Theo Angelopoulos' final film. Intended as the middle section of a trilogy bridging Greece's history from post-WW1 to the present day, The Dust of Time centres upon an American filmmaker attempting to reconcile past and present while making a film about the journey of his mother.

An afternoon of short films - stories of people on the move that are confronted with the new reality their life has become. From difficult goodbyes, to unlikely encounters, this programme encompasses the best short fiction films we’ve seen this year.

In 2008, the growing tourism industry of Cape Verde froze. The building of resorts halted due to a shortage of sand. Tracing the shipping routes of the sand industry As Cidades e as Trocas highlights the physical and social transformations in the landscape produced in its exchanges.

To coincide with World AIDS Day, The Independent partners with the ICA to present Bel Trew's documentary exploring the real cost of Trump's aid cuts on HIV.