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. 

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.

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). 

A fearless, Palme d’Or winning, tour-de-force from cinematic luminary Jafar Panahi. Both urgently political and deeply humane, this new moral classic confronts truth and uncertainty, revenge and mercy, head-on.

Sergio, an environmental engineer from Portugal, travels to Guinea-Bissau for an impact report. There, lonely in the heat, he encounters Diara and Guilermhe and begins to approach the post-colonial and capitalist forces shaping their lives.

A sense of otherworldly threat pervades French-Moroccan director Sofia Alaoui’s intriguing philosophical sci-fi Animalia, an extension of her Sundance Grand Jury-winning 2020 short, So What If the Goats Die.

Nikola is a farmer grappling with the harsh realities of new government policies. When his family leaves, Nikola takes a job as a landfill attendant, where he encounters the injured white stork Silyan and an unlikely bond forms between man and animal. 

An incomplete selection of Wiseman’s landmark works, spanning nearly six decades, on the occasion of the UK release of his most recent film, Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros. 

David Bowie was always more than just a musician—he was an icon of transformation. For decades, he captivated the world with his chameleon-like ability to reinvent himself, constantly pushing boundaries in both music and identity. But in the final act of his life, he underwent something even more profound: a resurrection.

A rich portrait of the Troisgros family, tracing four generations of culinary excellence and daily life across their three Michelin-starred restaurants in the heart of central France.

Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall star in the masterful new film from Ira Sachs, an intimate, richly cinematic rendering of a conversation between photographer Peter Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz.

Timothée Chalamet stars as a restless ping-pong player chasing greatness in 1950s New York.

A stark portrayal of the conditions that existed at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts. 

The lives and cases of subjects in Memphis Juvenile Court, revealing tensions between rehabilitation and punishment, legal constraints, offender psychology, and the court’s limited choices.

Revealing the complex systems of American welfare through cases of unemployment, housing, health, and family crises, showing struggles of clients and workers navigating regulations.

A young Marine sniper awaiting action in the Gulf War experiences the loneliness and frustrations of combat while worrying about home and his future. Selected by Tanoa Sasraku to accompany her exhibition.

Another Man and the ICA present a screening of Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day, followed by a Q&A panel discussion between Gary Schneider and Vince Aletti, hosted by John Douglas Millar.

A programme of five of Diagonale’s finest productions to mark the release of issue 2 of the international film quarterly Narrow Margin.

The film that first united many of the cast and crew members who would become Diagonale mainstays, Paul Vecchiali’s Femmes femmes, lauded as “exceptionally beautiful” by Pier Paolo Pasolini, depicts the eccentric lives of two unemployed middle-aged actresses who share the same flat in Paris.

A film about a town famous in the 19th century for silver mining and now known for its scenic splendour, skiing, intellectual activity and fashionable people. 

A concise selection of works by Adachi Masao spanning more than fifty years. Centred on the release of a recent restoration of AKA Serial Killer (1969) and the UK premiere run of his latest film, Escape (2025), the programme highlights key dimensions of Adachi’s practice: underground experimentation and pink political cinema, the development of landscape theory, militant newsreel, and later works. 

Made in 1969, AKA Serial Killer is a landmark of Japanese political cinema and the foundational work of landscape theory. Prompted by the murders committed by the young Nagayama Norio in 1968, the film reconstructs his life through the spaces he would have encountered, treating the urban and industrial landscapes of late-1960s Japan as sites where postwar modernisation, social oppression, and state authority are visible and intertwined. 

Documentarian Gianfranco Rosi’s monumental latest details with pointillist precision and unnerving beauty a region in Naples living under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius and above the simmering Campi Flegrei volcanic caldera.

Made in 1971, Adachi and Wakamatsu travelled to Beirut amid the international revolutionary movements of the late 1960s. Working with the Red Army Faction and the PFLP, this newsreel documents the daily life and training of Palestinian guerrillas within a wider international anti-imperial struggle, marking the transition of landscape theory into questions of media, militant propaganda, and reportage, and circulating through a volunteer-run film-screening campaign.

One of the pair of films with which Diagonale was inaugurated, Jean-Claude Biette’s debut feature explores the lives of the members of a small, cash-strapped theatrical company on the outskirts of Paris, in an understated and offbeat meditation on making art in difficult conditions.

A double bill devoted to Godard’s extensive engagement with theatre in the 1960s: Jacques Rivette’s The Nun (1966), which evolved out of a stage production funded by Godard, and La Chinoise (1967), which was the culmination of his exploration of theatrical forms in this decade.

Showcases Wiseman’s masterful style, focusing on American Ballet Theatre’s 1992 season, with stunning rehearsal scenes and a lyrical European tour by young dancers.

A double bill of films that double: Jackie Raynal's Deux fois and Barbara Rubin's Christmas on Earth.

Jean-Claude Guiguet’s stark, claustrophobic story of class and constraint sees Camille, a young proletarian from the provinces, arrive in Paris to work for the grande bourgeoise Hélène, whose son has spent two years voluntarily confined to his bedroom.  

A portrait of life at Chicago’s Ida B. Wells housing project, depicting poverty, community efforts, social programmes, and government involvement in managing public housing.

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.

A former member of the East Asian Anti-Japanese Armed Front’s 'Scorpion Cell'; Kirishima Satoshi spent decades underground, living quietly under an alias as a wanted fugitive. As he confronts terminal illness in 2024, his years on the run resurface. Juxtaposing these final moments with his own revolutionary past, Adachi Masao portrays Kirishima’s anguish and determination in Escape.

Following The Worst Person in the World, Joachim Trier reunites with Renate Reinsve for a moving exploration of sisterhood, father-daughter relationships and the evocative power of childhood memories. Sentimental Value won the Cannes Grand Prix award, and features career-best performances from Golden Globe winner Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning. 

Made in 1969, Female Student Guerrilla mixes political provocation with the transgressive, psychosexual elements of pink cinema, using the genre as a vehicle for satirical self-critique within revolutionary rhetoric, through the story of five high schoolers who take up arms and embark on a guerrilla-style revolution in the mountains.

Marie-Claude Treilhou drew on her own experience as an usher in an adult cinema for her debut film, which follows its title character over the course of a single night, from a shift dealing with porn theatre clientele, to a bizarre lesbian cabaret, to a car ride shared with a melancholy older man, in an unforgettable depiction of an unseen Paris.

A programme of films showcasing the work of American experimental filmmaker Carl Elsaesser, presented by Open City Documentary Festival, moving between melodrama and residues, as evidence of cinema’s capacity to mourn, desire and care.

Following a violent bus hijacking, three survivors – a bus driver and two siblings – embark on a quiet journey across Japan’s southern landscape. Part road film, part unconventional family drama, Eureka reimagines the bounds of cinema at the turn of the century with magnetic force.

Wiseman explores university life at California’s oldest and most prestigious public campus, highlighting its academic mission, governance, social role, and collaboration between administration and communities.

Paul Vecchiali’s masterpiece, constructed out of meticulously choreographed sequence shots, is perhaps the apex of what Diagonale achieved. The first French film to depict the AIDS crisis, it tells the story of a middle-aged family man who decides to leave his wife and pursue his attraction to men.  

Revolution+1 offers a fictionalised account of the man who assassinated former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō in 2022, focusing on the social and economic pressures that shaped his life. Made and circulated with striking speed, the film continues Adachi Masao’s examination of political power, social inequality, and contemporary Japan.

Sonic Cinema presents a programme of ten short films, bringing together the practices of Vienna-based filmmakers Viktoria Schmid and Johann Lurf for the first time.

Looking for a job? When a happy family man is dismissed after twenty-five years of loyal service at a paper company, he finds the perfect solution to land his next role: truly eliminate the competition.

Two young music students, Lionel and David, attending the Boston Conservatory in 1917, bond over their shared love of folk music. They reconnect a few years later, embarking on a song collecting trip in the backwaters of Maine.

The UK’s leading short film festival, the London Short Film Festival (LSFF), returns for its 23rd edition from 23 January – 1 February 2026, bringing films and events to London’s iconic cinemas alongside community and creative spaces.

Strut into history: uncover the fierce, fabulous, and revolutionary trans-feminine stories of the 1970s on newly unearthed archival film! 

Stories of national liberation brought to life through film and a shared music listening experience.

Come with us on an absurd and eclectic journey into the world of CoreCore - a chaotic, heartfelt, and strangely beautiful reflection of our times.

Reclaiming feminist space, these films project femme identity through TikToks and digital collusions, tracing queer rebellion and oral histories. 

Six films set their gaze upon possessions that hold the power to possess us in return.

Shortlisted filmmakers for The Arts Foundation Futures Awards 2026 in Film present and discuss their work.

Earth, water, air and fire. Experimental, collaboratively made shorts exploring the entanglement of nature, architecture, and colonialism in Central Asia. Each film corresponds to a natural element.

Rehearse, Resist, Repeat.

Obsessions and passions unite global stories.

You will be captured by London CCTV cameras up to seventy times today.

I'm not Okay: Investigating emo.

A playful, poignant love letter to cinema, Nouvelle Vague reimagines the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless in an exuberant exploration of the youthful rebellion and creative chaos that shaped the French New Wave.

Films that put the artists and the creators at the forefront.  

Observing the hilarity and horror of technology's place in our lives - how deeply our inventions shape the fragile worlds we build around their glow.

How do I see me, when I see you?

Celebrating life in all its forms. 

Listen With Your Eyes is an ongoing series of screenings for children of all ages and their grown-up companions. It’s a space where curious minds and open hearts can come together to explore the wonders of experimental cinema.

The soil and wind are whispering, I'm here, listening.

A moment of defiance in the West Bank opens a quiet reflection on inherited resilience, as one Palestinian family’s past—from the Nakba to today—casts a long shadow over the present. Followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker.

Lana Daher’s archival essay film is a personal journey through Lebanon’s audiovisual memory that spans 70 years of film, television, home movies and photography. 

The UK’s largest festival of Japanese cinema, the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme (JFTFP), is back again. This is the place where cinema comes alive!

Two young brothers explore Lagos with their estranged father during the 1993 Nigerian election crisis, witnessing both the city’s magnitude and their father’s daily struggles as political unrest threatens their journey home.

A young woman finds her voice through the written word and her salvation as a swimmer — ultimately becoming a triumphant teacher, mother and a singular modern writer.

Since 2010, filmmaker Isiah Medina has quietly been building a collection of idiosyncratic, formally arresting, and uniquely current films. Bringing together all five of his feature films to date, alongside a selection of his shorts, this retrospective provides a rare opportunity to explore one of contemporary cinema's most remarkable bodies of work.

This programme brings together a selection of Isiah Medina's short films tracing a variety of formal and narrative evolutions in his work, spanning an entire decade from 2010 to 2020.

Taking its title from the reset that displays on an appliance after the power has been cut, Isiah Medina's debut feature 88:88, is a profoundly humanistic and densely layered exploration of suspension and the running in place reality of contemporary life.

A programme of three short works by José Luis Guerín, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Hong Sangsoo, exploring and celebrating the JEONJU Digital Project initiative.

Following the deeply personal 88:88, Isiah Medina turns to adaptation with his second feature, tackling Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams' 2015 post-work manifesto to craft another radical work of montage that explores everything from the failings of neo-liberalism to the tactile reality of free time.

In 1990s Iraq, 9-year-old Lamia must bake Saddam Hussein's birthday cake. She scrambles to find ingredients for this compulsory task while facing potential punishment if she fails.

A moment of defiance in the West Bank opens a quiet reflection on inherited resilience, as one Palestinian family’s past—from the Nakba to today—casts a long shadow over the present. 

Isiah Medina's third feature marks another key evolution in his work, with performance and character coming into greater focus, as he continues to develop his cinema-of-thought through the form of a philosophical hangout movie.

Commissioned by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Isiah Medina's fourth feature centres upon a painter staging a heist to steal back his paintings from the vault of a museum, and a filmmaker who just so happens to be conducting research at the museum on the very same day.

Schroeter’s first feature unfolds like a fevered collage of opera and cinematic dream, as performers move, lip-syncing tragically, in drag, through industrial and domestic spaces. 

A university professor travels from São Paulo to the seaside city of Recife during Carnival week, hoping to reunite with his son. He soon finds out he’s been tailed and spied on by neighbours in his new refuge, leaving him no possible escape from the tentacles of corruption.

Isiah Medina strikingly reimagines the gangster picture in this profound and ironic examination of both depiction, endorsement, and the morality of making and consuming cinema.

Intimate and fragmented moments unfold in a community of zoos and animal rescue centres across Argentina. As histories of these institutions are uncovered, dedicated workers commit both day and night to caring for the remaining enclosed animals, fostering a mutual bond that transcends imagined boundaries between human and animal.

By the end of 1968 Schroeter had acquired a 16mm Beaulieu camera with which he began making longer work in black and white that became points of departure in his art. This screening presents three such pieces.

An odyssey through desert and soul, following a father and son across a stark Moroccan wilderness, as they chase a loose thread to an illegal rave filled outcasts, for their missing daughter, and sister. 

Made for television Der Bomberpilot enlists Schroeter's anchoring structure of three women to probe cultural legacies of Fascist Germany, in sly, uneasy operetta style.

The first of two shorts programme, this screening compiles a selection of Schroeter's early 8mm works.

A father and his son arrive at a rave deep in the mountains of southern Morocco, searching for Mar who vanished months ago. Hope is fading but they push through and follow a group of ravers heading to one last party in the desert.

With her life crashing down around her, Linda (Rose Byrne) attempts to navigate her child's mysterious illness, her absent husband, a missing person, and an increasingly hostile relationship with her therapist.

In a world where humanity has lost the ability to dream, one creature remains entranced by the fading illusions of the dreamworld. This monster, adrift in reverie, clings to visions no one else can see — until a woman appears. 

A screening of four films by Antonia Luxem, substantiating their ongoing exploration into dreams, falling and altered states, followed by a conversation with curator Anna Colin, on dream logic as a method and the relationship between film, writing and performance.

Considered one of his best films by many, The Death of Maria Malibran, is a baroque meditation on grief, centred upon the fabled Spanish-French opera singer who died aged 28, that dissolves biography into a fantasia across three women: Magdalena Montezuma, Candy Darling and Ingrid Caven.

This second screening compiles many early works by Schroeter, presenting his attention to gestural cinema, myth, portrait, and art history through improvised adaptation.

A scorched fairytale, three women are entwined in a state of suffering that links them, unfolding like melodrama in the Californian desert.

The 24th KINOTEKA Polish Film Festival returns, presenting a curated selection of the most important contemporary and classic Polish films, documentaries and special events

Four adolescent girls each spend their youth in the same farmhouse over the last century. Separated by decades, resonances between their lives emerge: desires and distress, secrets and truths, encounters with another’s gaze and defiant gaze in return.

Drawing on telenovelas and home movies, the debut feature from Mexican filmmaker Racornelia incisively unravels the shifting power dynamics underlying a young family’s Christmas dinner in Mexico City.

Told across four episodes that weave together high and low culture, Les Flocons d'or is a richly textured tapestry of underground filmmaking in the epic register.

Three documentary snapshots of the cultural and political upheavals of late 1960s America: D.A. Pennebaker’s seminal festival film, Monterey Pop; Agnès Varda’s Black Panthers; and Pennebaker’s One P.M., which draws extensively on footage shot for Jean-Luc Godard’s abandoned One American Movie.

A melodramatic epic that looks to community and love, Church and Communism, poverty and spirit, as it chronicles of the lives of two postwar Neapolitan families.

A special 35mm screening of Allison Anders’ breakthrough 1990s indie about a single mother and her two teenage daughters living in a small border town in New Mexico.

In a world where humanity has lost the ability to dream, one creature remains entranced by the fading illusions of the dreamworld. This monster, adrift in reverie, clings to visions no one else can see — until a woman appears. 

A year in the life of a family as parents navigate their separation. Through playful and heartfelt moments, the film portrays the bittersweet nature of faded love and shared memories amidst the changing seasons.

A rare screening of Allison Anders’ evocative film about the lives of young Latina women in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the early 1990s.

WORSHIP explores representations of adoration, fetishism, and devotion found within queer, kink and fetish pornography. All films will be presented in their original VHS format, sourced from the UK Fetish Archive and the curator’s own shelves.

Described by Gary Indiana as “one of the most beautiful adaptations of [Wilde’s] text to film ever made,” Schroeter’s Salomé was made in Lebanon with a close cadre of collaborators and closely restages the biblical story.

A young Sicilian peasant who travels north to Germany as a Gastarbeiter, as Schroeter's habitual excess melds with a neorealist tendency.

Two kinds of hell...

A raw study of confinement and disintegration set largely within the confines of a psychiatric hospital in Prague starring Carole Bouquet.

A bold documentary portrait of the inimitable singer, songwriter and icon: Marianne
Faithfull.

Arco, a 10-year-old boy from a peaceful, distant future, accidentally travels back in time to discover a world in peril. Arco develops a friendship with a young girl named Iris, along with her trusted robot caretaker Mikki, on a quest to get Arco home. 

In Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s debut feature, a queer Moroccan coyote navigates distance and family in a genre-blurring animated journey through New York’s emotional landscapes. 

A partial retrospective bringing together the multimedia work of interdisciplinary, Rabat-born, New-York based artist, Meriem Bennani. Spanning work from the past decade in which the human and non-human continuously interact and coalesce, this programme traces the trajectory of an artist in the lead up to their latest and most personal filmic work, Bouchra. 

Two women, an American and a European flee from their lives to Mexico in an allegorical descent into the possibilities of transformation.

Screen Cuba celebrates Cuban cinema, looking at the achievements and challenges of the Cuban people through the decolonising lenses of their filmmakers since the 1959 Revolution, and presents films rarely screened in the UK. 

Through the dramas of three women from different classes in three different crucial historical moments, Solás explores women’s personal and political struggles in Cuba and the road ahead.

A striking portrait of life in Naples, a city living in the shadow of Vesuvius. Followed by a Q&A with director Gianfranco Rosi and composer Daniel Blumberg, along with an acoustic performance by John Butcher and Seymour Wright.

This powerful drama brings a pious sugar plantation owner in 1790s Cuba, attempting to head off an uprising by sharing his table at Easter with 12 enslaved men. A radical and sometimes surreal parable showing slavery as an economic system and championing Black resistance.

Sergey Loznitsa returns to fiction in the historical drama based on an unpublished novella from a Gulag survivor.

A sweeping exploration of love, duty, and personal freedom. Toni Servillo stars as Italy’s outgoing president, Mariano De Santis, navigating moral and personal crossroads with the help of his confidante and daughter, Dorotea.

Magdalena Montezuma plays the owner of a rose plantation in Portugal, who lives with her son in anxious dependence, until an Italian worker steals him away for himself. An unutterably beautiful and sumptuous tale of desire, devotion and sacrifice.

Five rarely screened documentaries about Palestine from the late 1960s and 1970s, including Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s Here and Elsewhere (1976), which draws on rushes filmed in 1970 by the Dziga Vertov group (of which Godard had been a core member) for their abandoned film on the Palestinian revolution, Until Victory.

Mohamad Abdouni’s meditative film reminisces on childhood, motherhood and coming of age during the turbulence of war, alongside the underground world of nightclubs and illicit sex. Weaving rare archival images from the 1980s to the 2000s with contemporary testimonies by transgender and intersex community elders, aka ‘aunties’, it’s an exceptional glimpse into Lebanon’s trans history.

A screening of Elfi Mikesch's documentary about Werner Schroeter, exclusively for ICA Members and their guests

Shot clandestinely while Schroeter was a guest of the Manila International Film Festival, The Smiling Star (Der lachende Stern) is a dense, documentary-collage on the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. A lamentation on power and spectacle.

Emma Matthew’s and Christopher Petit’s  unique and tender new film is a meditation on cinema, the NHS and family relationships. The story of the filmmakers’ son Louis, and his debilitating epilepsy, through an extraordinary archive of personal footage and Jodhi May’s narration.

Violette and Florence are two women with something in common, beyond being neighbours. While one finds herself on an emotional edge during her maternity leave, the other feels nothing at all, and neither can make sense of what’s happening to them. Realising that their suburban lives have left them unfulfilled, Florence begins an affair that kicks off a sexual revolution where having fun is the top priority.

Isabelle Huppert plays a dual role of two young twins, Marie and Magdelana, in Schroeter's poetic rumination on the self and its shadows.

Adapted for the screen from Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1971 novel by the Austrian playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek, Malina is a somber and strange exploration of passion and self destruction inside a Viennese apartment.

François Ozon’s exquisite adaptation of Albert Camus’s classic existential novel brings the contradictions and hypocrisy of the French colonial project into sharper focus, while maintaining the original novel’s spirit of philosophical provocation. 

Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the latest film from Jim Jarmusch takes the form of a triptych, to tell three stories concerning the relationships between adult children, their somewhat distant parent (or parents), and each other.

Radu Jude resurrects Dracula, dissecting modern Europe and its myths through a collision of AI mischief and pornographic absurdity.

Experience a rare original 35MM screening of AKIRA at the first cinema that showed the film in the UK back in the early 90s - the ICA!  A special guest panel will follow the screening to discuss the seismic cultural impact of the film.

Schroeter’s crepuscular final film, shot in the port city of Porto, departs from Juan Carlos Onetti’s novel Para esta noche, as a fugue-like exploration of the shadows of history and despair, and hope in spite of it.

Open City Documentary Festival takes place from 14-19 April, bringing the art of non-fiction to venues across London. Through a programme of film screenings, workshops, panels, talks and an exhibition, the festival showcases new non-fiction works from an international range of filmmakers and provides a space to discuss non-fiction storytelling.

Set in near-future Brazil where the government prioritises productivity above all else, elderly citizens are forcibly relocated to remote colonies to make way for younger generations. When 77 year old Tereza reaches the mandated age, she refuses to comply.

Laura, a piano student from Berlin, miraculously survives an accident. Physically unhurt but deeply shaken, she is taken in by a local woman who witnessed the accident. When her husband and adult son also give up their initial resistance to Laura's presence, the four of them slowly build a familial routine. 

Iconic and game-changing, Katsuhiro Otomo's landmark anime returns to the cinema where it was first released in the UK.

When a fishing boat, the Rose of Nevada, lost with all hands 30 years ago, mysteriously reappears in the old harbour of a forgotten Cornish village, for those who remember, it’s surely a sign. The boat must go out to sea again and maybe then the luck of the devastated village will turn.

Spanning decades and continents, this programme brings together three films by the independent filmmaker Penny Allen.

Alone in the mountains: Olivia, her Father, and their home. By the foothills, a slaughterhouse, where Father works. She dreams by day and lives by night; they share only dusks and dawns before the rising sun lulls her to sleep. When Father disappears, Olivia descends the mountains in search of him.

Armenian Film Society London and Armenian Heritage Month campaign present the long overdue UK premiere of Komitas, a haunting and unconventional film by Don Askarian centred upon one of Armenia’s most significant cultural figures, the pioneering composer and musicologist Komitas Vardapet.

After the sudden death of her estranged sister, Parker leaves her actor life in Los Angeles and returns to her desert hometown in search of answers.

Julian Radlmaier's fifth feature brings together an East German waitress with a broken heart and an Iranian YouTuber with a broken arm, in an enigmatic comedy about the ghosts of the past and the mysteries of the present.

At a sports boarding school, talented young boxer Camille narrowly survives a fatal accident, saved by his best friend Matteo. After a swift recovery, an inexplicable pain gradually takes hold of him, threatening his dreams of greatness and his relationship with the team.

A cross-disciplinary festival that showcases boundary-pushing LGBTQ+ cinema, live arts, and moving image work from East and Southeast Asia and its diaspora communities. 

This hybrid documentary from Thai director Thunska Pansittivorakul commences as a film about Mor Lam, folk music that originated in Laos, before mounting a searing critique of state repression and violence. Queer in its gaze and endlessly inventive in its style, Isan Odyssey is an ambitious and unpredictable work.

Eleven-year-old Yekta lives in a crumbling island mansion with her strict aunts and ailing grandfather, yearning for her absent mother. As dreams and surreal visions shape her solitude, she sets out in search of a mythical seagull with a child’s head.

When Hiroyuki Oki (1964-2025) passed away suddenly late last year, Japan lost one of its most singular and tireless artist-filmmakers. His amorphous work, traversing documentary and fiction, frequently harnessed smaller, more intimate forms of cinema (8mm, 16mm, video, the home movie) for their unique potential. 

The UK premiere of two short films by Olaa Zhyzhko, a filmmaker born in Kyiv, now living and working in Paris. In Olaa’s Ark, the self is mediated through filmmaking, the director in front of a camera, in the now recognisable mode of autofiction, negotiating her own image under its gaze. Just Drifting inverts this: an intimate, immersive portrait in which a character does not watch herself but dissolves into her circumstances.

Niki de Saint Phalle is well-known as an artist who most famously took fire at paint-filled canvases and sculpted voluptuous feminine figures, before spending twenty years creating her monumental site-specific work, The Tarot Garden, in Tuscany. That she made feature films is less widely known, but in the mid-1970s, she extended several themes of her work into explosive and fantastical cinema.

18-year-old Marina, travels to Vigo on the Galician coast in the early 2000s, in search of information about her biological father, seeking his death certificate to apply for a scholarship to film school. Reconnecting with her paternal side of the family, she discovers a huge amount of shame and secrecy around his death.

In 1964 Nagasaki, an orphaned yakuza heir enters the world of Kabuki, growing up beside his mentor’s son as rivalry and ambition shape their destinies.

By turns surrealist and sexually provocative, Niki de Saint Phalle’s feverish debut transforms the pain of personal trauma into the meaty material for raw psychosexual catharsis. Made with filmmaker and ex-lover Peter Whitehead, this hallucinatory rape-revenge fantasy remains as controversial as when it first premiered in 1973.

An increasingly morose and violent veteran detective is packed off to the snowy countryside to investigate the murder of a young woman in Nicholas Ray and Ida Lupino's bruising mix of noir and melodrama.

Jia-hao is a sassy Singaporean drag queen who barely sees his family, but reluctantly returns home to help his brother care for their mother, who has dementia. Both hilariously funny and profoundly moving, this riveting drama features knockout performances from a talented cast, headed by rising star Richie Koh.

A double bill devoted to the Godardian remake comprising Jacques Becker’s classic Don’t Touch the Loot (Touchez pas au grisbi, 1954), which he planned to remake in the 1990s, and Number Two (Numéro deux, 1975), which started off as a remake of À bout de souffle (Breathless).

Otoko is a famous painter who, as a teenager, was seduced by the married novelist Oto. Years later, when he reappears in her life, Otoko’s pupil and lesbian lover Keiko vows to take revenge. Exquisite cinematography and evocative use of the Kyoto locations conjure up a claustrophobic feel in this classic tale of obsessive love.

Garnering comparisons on its 1976 release to Jean Cocteau and Georges Mèlies, Niki de Saint Phalle’s colourful, marvellously polymorphic fairytale follows a girl into an alluring dreamscape, where sexual awakening is imagined as an excitable quest that runs on quixotic feminine desire. 

Widowed actor René lives in purposeful isolation, drifting between phone conversations and memories that refuse to settle, as fragments of a distant past resurface.

Manoel de Oliveira (on whose films Azevedo Gomes worked) and João Bénard da Costa are brought together within the quiet grandeur of Lisbon’s National Museum of Ancient Art. Decades of thought, friendship, and devotion to art.

Across speculative storytelling, deepfake resurrection, and AI mythologies, Myths We Call Bodies explores how contemporary Asian artists use digital aesthetics to question the structures that shape our realities. From algorithmic gazes to cosplay, these works reveal how technology both reproduces and disrupts systems of gender, labour, and visibility. Moving between online fantasy and social critique, the artists imagine alternative myths and futures where identity becomes mutable and collectively re-scripted. 

Artist and filmmaker Tianyi Zheng returns to her ancestral village in Huangpi, Wuhan, the purported hometown of Mulan, the legendary figure known for fighting battles while disguised as a male warrior. With documentary and performative elements, Where Comes Mulan excavates cultural mythology while offering a personal reflection on displacement, queerness, and identity.

In Muslim-majority Malaysia, a queer punk band led by a trans man are outliers of the system – carving out spaces to exist through their music while challenging conservative traditions and religious extremism.

When the mysterious woman in the room next door disappears, a debonair 70-year-old ex-spy living in a luxury hotel on the Côte d’Azur is confronted by the demons of a lurid past in which moviemaking, memories and madness collide.

Queer East hosts a special all-day event at the ICA, featuring a line-up of film, performance, and practice-based workshops culminating in a club night. Chasing the dizzying ecstasy of movement in all its eclectic potentials. This experimental showcase will flow across disciplines and throughout the venue, concocting a sensory mixed bill of bold sounds, moving image, and haptic intimacies.

A Rita Azevedo Gomes double bill: an adaption of a medieval Portuguese farce and a contemplation on art and cultivated lives, faltering and fragile.

A screening and Q&A exploring the continuing relevance of the late theorist’s ideas on capitalism, culture and the future.

When a mysterious woman enters Roberto’s life, unfurling as a measured and elegant interrogation of power, gender, and narrative ownership through confession in Azevedo Gomes’ adaptation of Barbey d’Aurevilly. 

A kaleidoscopic portrait of the visionary jazz musician, composer, and poet known as Sun Ra and the musical, historical, and philosophical currents that shaped him.

A taut political thriller from the director of Cairo Conspiracy, Tarik Saleh's latest film centres upon Egypt’s most adored actor, George El-Nabawi, who on the verge of losing everything finds himself forced to accept an offer he can’t refuse.

Charlotte Zhang's mesmerising debut feature effortlessly merges forms and formats to craft a paranoid spiral into a city on the brink, as Los Angeles is encircled by militarized policing, meat shortages and cockroach infestations on the eve of the 2028 Olympics.

Told entirely from the perspective of its avian protagonist, following a chicken who escapes an industrial farm only to find herself navigating the pecking order of a crumbling seaside restaurant in Greece.

Casa Verdi, a rambling mansion in the city of Milan that once belonged to the composer Guiseppe Verdi, but is now a home for retired musicians, sits at the centre of Daniel Schmid's tender exploration of aging and the timeless capacity of music to inspire.

A tapestry of intimate dialogue where voices float free of their sources and images drift away from illustrations. Correspondences is cinema as epistolary form built from letters exchanged between poets Jorge de Sena and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen.

In this deadpan and refreshingly intimate new comedy, we follow Ann, a young woman in a low-level corporate job, as she juggles her long-term casual BDSM relationship, difficult New Yorker parents, and a desire for something more.

A constellation of films offering a unique insight into Godard’s creative process: his seminal investigation of the cinema-painting relationship, Passion (1982), and four related satellite works, including rare test footage he shot in 1981 at Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios, his audiovisual ‘script’ for the film, and the video essay he made about it afterwards. 

On May 22, 1914, Herman Poole Blount arrived on Earth in Birmingham, Alabama, known as The Magic City, a segregated industrial town in the rural South. After leaving for Chicago at the age of 32, he would become Sun Ra, one of the most eccentric and prolific jazz musicians of this century, as well as the founder of a strange cosmic philosophy. 

Rita Azevedo Gomes and Pierre Léon’s roaming inquiry into the danse macabre as a turning point in European thought, that draws on Jean Louis Schefer’s writings to trace a quiet shift from medieval worldviews to modernity, moving between Paris and Portugal.

The story of artist Leonora Carrington, a woman who turned trauma into transcendence, creating beauty from chaos and forging a legacy that changed the history of modern art.

After re-inventing the action film with The Killer, John Woo would turn inward and deliver the semi-autobiographical Bullet in the Head, complementing the stylistic flourishes that made his name with an unflinching and nihilistic brutality to deliver one of the most intense war films of all time.

UNIFORM explores the pleasures of costume, rank, and role - the way a garment can assign desire, confer power or demand submission. From the maid’s apron to nurse’s scrubs and military camo - it’s time to get ready and dress for the occasion.

Originally made for television this sparse chamber piece. set in an empty theatre, returns Ingmar Bergman to one of his perennial themes the permeability of life and art.

A luminous contemplation on waiting and interior life reimagined from Robert Musil’s tale

A final double bill from the Machine that Kills Bad People.

A constellation of meetings between two former lovers, The Kegelstatt Trio unfolds through rehearsals, fragments, and returns, guided by Mozart’s trio. 

Golden Bear winner Radu Jude’s film is a pin-sharp, caustically funny critique of workplace culture.

Fifteen years after the original trip to Greece, with a cancer diagnosis once thought final, a filmmaker retraces her journey through the Greek islands – this time with a group of young friends, filming, reading, singing, and moving from ferry to roadside to ruin.

A 16-year-old boy defies his bourgeois family's expectations by starting a masonry apprenticeship where he meets a charismatic Ukrainian colleague who shakes up his world.

A drama of broken-hearted cowboys and broken-down marriages, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift co-star as an aging cowboy and a rodeo-rocked bull rider in John Huston’s swan song to the Western, and Marilyn Monroe’s final film.

In 1975 Cologne, an ambitious teenage concert promoter , Vera Brandes (Mala Emde),
defies her conservative family and navigates impossible odds to book American jazz
pianist Keith Jarrett (John Magaro) for what becomes the legendary Köln Concert.

Songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Butch Bastard joins us for an evening of live music and cinema, one rich in counterculture mythologies, weathered landscapes and drifting americana. Featuring a live performance from Butch Bastard alongside a screening of Candy Mountain, the cult 1987 road movie by Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer.

A girl called Moon adventures in a world without adults in Mare’s Nest, the latest feature by acclaimed British artist and filmmaker Ben Rivers, followed by a Q&A.

A Shakespearean double bill comprising Orson Welles’s pioneering audiovisual essay about his 1951 Othello adaptation, Filming Othello (1978), and Jean-Luc Godard’s visually and sonically stunning King Lear (1987), which he originally conceived as a collaboration with Welles.

A girl called Moon adventures in a world without adults in Mare’s Nest, the latest feature by acclaimed British artist and filmmaker Ben Rivers.

A provocative portrait of a ‘cruel’ dominatrix, co-written and directed by Elfi Mikesch and Monika Treut. Once divisive, it is now considered as a landmark of queer cinema, celebrated for its exquisite mise-en-scène and Mikesch’s striking cinematography, preceded by the short film The Blue Distance.

Paul Thomas Anderson's San Fernando Valley-set tale of the rise and fall of a dishwasher turned porn phenom is a bravura exploration of family, fame and the American dream in all its excess.

With its highly charged hallucinogenic quality and its atmosphere of lush decadence, Pink Narcissus is a landmark of gay cinema.

This film screening brings together works by Hiwa K, Alia Farid, and Jonathas de Andrade to explore diasporic home-making and the lived realities of migration through powerful moving image narratives.

While the Gods Were Busy with Another Child (2026) by Andrea Luka Zimmerman and All These Summers (2025) by Therese Henningsen + in conversation with Rachel Garfield. 

The Armenian Film Society London presents the UK premiere of Christine Haroutounian debut feature After Dreaming, that follows Claudette, the daughter of a mistakenly assassinated well-digger, and Atom, a tight-lipped soldier, as they drift across a country suspended in a state of limbo, neither at war nor at peace.

An opaque journey through the Georgian countryside, Alexandre Koberidze's latest film is a remarkable exploration of absence, as a father traces a path through villages and football fields in search of his missing daughter.

One morning, Nino attends a doctor’s appointment where he is given some upsetting news. The treatment will start on Monday morning, but there is a high chance that it might leave him infertile, so the doctor tells him to consider freezing his sperm. 

A coming-of-old-age film following an older woman’s transition into assisted living as she contends with her conflicting relationship with herself and her caregivers amidst her shifting memory, age identity, and desires.

A double-bill screening of Buck Ellison’s short film and Lauren Greenfield’s documentary. 

On Vancouver Island in the late 1990s eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant family attempt to build a new life, only to be destabilised by the increasingly dangerous behaviour of her older brother, Jeremy.

One of the most notorious J-Horror films ever made, Takashi Miike's Audition exploded onto the festival circuit at the turn of the 21st century to a chorus of awards and praise. The film catapulted Miike to the international scene and paved the way for such other genre delights as Ichii the Killer and 13 Assassins.

At once a landmark of 1980s Hong Kong cinema and the harbinger of John Woo's future star-studded career, A Better Tomorrow broke the mould with its kinetic action sequences, razor sharp script and breakout performance by Chow Yun-Fat.

A programme exploring Godard’s relationship with Swiss author Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz. Includes the UK Premiere of the acclaimed restoration of Dimitri Kirsanoff’s landmark Ramuz adaptation, Rapt (The Kidnapping, 1934), and two Godard videos made in dialogue with Ramuz: Les Signes parmi nous (‘The signs among us’, 1998) and, co-directed with Anne-Marie Miéville, Liberté et patrie (‘Freedom and fatherland’, 2002).

One of the most original, self-assured, yet undersung voices of the French New Wave, Jacques Rozier crafted, across a career spanning five decades, a cinema attuned to the beauty and heartbreak of chance encounters, improvised days and spontaneous play.

From a distinctive period in a filmmaker or actor’s career to the varied cinematographic interpretations of a great novelist's work, this continuing series offers an opportunity to draw connections across mediums and to narrow in on the details.

Capturing both the giddy thrill of innocent flirtation and the anguish of youth faced with an uncertain future, Jacques Rozier's debut feature was championed by his contemporaries François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.

A rare screening of Cindy Sherman's only feature film, a comedy-slasher film co-written with Todd Haynes.  

A haunted young man travels to a remote island to reconnect with his father and confront the traumatic experience they shared ten years prior that transformed their relationship.

A London-based Lebanese journalist and a Syrian activist and cameraman retrace their love story over thirteen years of war, revolutions and exile. Drawing on intimate personal archive, Birds of War asks what it means to build a life together in a world shaped by conflict.

Inspired by Mia Couto's tale A Morte, o Tempo e o Velho and Aristophanes' play The Birds, this surreal fable delves into the relationship between humans, gods, and time, exploring the cycles of life and the quest for freedom.

Perfectly capturing both the liberating promise and melancholic effervescence of summer, Near Orouët is a masterpiece of the post-New Wave era and a beautiful meditation on the fleetingness of youth, love, and time.

Abducted, beaten and tortured for money on camera, the footage then shared online, destroying lives. This is the world of “kito” attacks in Nigeria: where members of the LGBTQ+ community are entrapped, humiliated and extorted by gangs in a rising surge in violence and hatred.

This programme brings together four shorts by Jacques Rozier from 1958's Rivera-set Blue Jeans to 1983's unique reflection on the state of contemporary filmmaking Lettre de la Sierra Morena

The festival returns for its 17th year with a rich selection of cutting-edge new cinema alongside restored classics celebrating the magnificence of Indian cinema.

The latest film from Karim Aïnouz is an outrageous satire on the absurdity of the patriarchal family.

Francesco Sossai’s dazzling sophomore feature is many things at once: a road movie, a casual caper, a tribute to a vanishing industrial Italy, a scruffy intergenerational odyssey, and free-flowing bender through time and space.

Sumitra Peries' groundbreaking Sri Lankan film offers a tender and transporting journey through young dreams and first loves.

PRESSURE explores the fetishism of bodies and the desire for no frills full body contact - stripped back to the sensation of flesh against flesh and the beautiful stink of sweat. Dust yourself off and get in the ring as we get physical with tickling, trampling, wrestling, and more than a few muscle mummies.

Having framed his first two features as seaside holiday films, Rozier used the third, The Castaways of Turtle Island, to mock the tourist industry in a hilarious comic send-up that could only have emerged from Rozier’s puckish imagination.

The River Douro in Porto is the area of Portuguese maritime territory with the highest number of suicides by jumping. Gastão has dedicated his life to recovering these bodies, not to try to save them, but to return them to their families, who can only move on once they have been recovered.

Artist Alexander Carey-Morgan buries himself within half a ton of clay for three days on a journey of self discovery and creative metamorphosis.

A subtle meditation on memory and performance, Hong Sangsoo's latest film unfolds through a series of increasingly intimate conversations, as he continues his exploration of the boundaries between lived experience and artistic creation.

A double bill of powerful features by Jean-Pierre Melville and Jean-Luc Godard that explore war, occupation, resistance and possible reconciliation. Accompanied by two sublime shorts, one co-directed by Simone Bitton and Godard’s nephew, Paul Grivas, who worked closely with his uncle from 2003 onwards. With an introduction by Paul Grivas, followed by discussion/Q&A.

The Synthetic Sincerity Lab based at the University of Southern England are trying to create authentic AI characters as part of a new research project and licence the films of Marc Isaacs' to better understand what his AI characters are lacking.

In dialogue with Elisa Giardina Papa's exhibition She Flickered In and Out of History, Iggy Cortez brings five short works: Islands of Fire, It’s Raining Frogs Outside, Fireworks (Archives), Mekong Hotel and Barbs, Wastelands. 

Andrei Tarkovsky's extraordinary and haunting exploration of exile, memory, and faith returns to the big screen in a new 4K restoration.

A special screening of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le deuxième souffle, exclusively for ICA Members and their guests

In dialogue with Elisa Giardina Papa's exhibition She Flickered In and Out of History, Onyeka Igwe presents Monisme (2023) directed by Riar Rizaldi, a film situated around Mount Merapi, an active volcano in Indonesia. 

12-year-old best friends Ish and Maram wrestle to hold on to their friendship in the wake of a police stop and search. As the ripples take hold, the boys try to make sense of the men they are becoming – and how ‘letting go’ can be the hardest part of growing up.

A key figure of the Japanese New Wave, Nagisa Ōshima's body of work is one of the most vital, challenging and admired in cinema history. This programme brings together nine of his films with a particular focus on the work he made through his own production company in the 1960s and early 70s, illuminating the anti-establishment spirit and formal radicalism running through his cinema.

Vladlena Sandu, a survivor of the war in Chechnya, studies her traumatic memories in order to transcend and transform them via cinema in her poetic debut feature.

The Final Film Festival is a film festival in London, showcasing new independent and restoration premieres to a local audience.

As part of a film programme exploring themes connected to the exhibition She Flickered In and Out of History, scholar Damon R. Young brings together three films: L’Hippocampe, L’atalante and Moon’s Pool. 

30-year-old Danielius returns to his hometown to sell his parents’ flat, but the visit lasts longer than expected in Vytautas Katkus' delicate study of homecoming, fatherhood, and belated farewells.

As part of a film programme exploring themes connected to the exhibition She Flickered In and Out of History, scholar Genevieve Yue presents Dahomey (2024), Mati Diop's acclaimed film tracing the repatriation of 26 looted treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey..

A playful spin on theatrical adaptation, Alejo Moguillansky's latest film is a delightfully imaginative take on Samuel Beckett's Fin de Partie, punctuated by music, tennis, and another exceptional turn by Laura Paredes.

Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill’s riveting documentary, shot over 3 months, following a group of women going through basic training for the US Army. Screening as a part of Contemporary Films 75th Anniversary celebration.

Weaving together oral histories, archaeological field notes, regional legends, poetry, and song, Maureen Fazendeiro's The Seasons is a remarkable portrait of the Alentejo region of Portugal, its people, and its stories.

Walerian Borowczyk’s critically acclaimed and influential medieval tale — a beautiful tragedy told with pitch-black humour and the director’s remarkable idiosyncratic inventiveness. Screening as a part of Contemporary Films 75th Anniversary celeberation.