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

An ongoing series presenting rare films from the ICA Archive, screening on original 35mm and 16mm prints.

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

The endlessly blurred and tangled lines of reality and fiction, cinema and theatre, and art and life form the heart of Jacques Rivette’s cinema. Throughout his extensive body of work the French filmmaker continually eschews and reformulates the traditional patterns of narrative cinema and instead embraces mystery, conspiracy, and the inexplicable.

The first full retrospective of the great Polish director Wojciech Jerzy Has, is presented in partnership with KINOTEKA and the BFI.

Inspired by James Hogg’s 1824, Has' film follows Robert’s haunting life, crimes, and encounters with a devilish Doppelgänger.

In 16th-century Germany, Balthazar and alchemist Cammerschulze flee to Venice, amid plague and religious persecution.

A hallucinatory masterpiece blending Bruno Schulz’s novella with Has’s obsessions, where Józef, seeking his past, finds a sanatorium portal revealing his fears. Stylistically rich, with a striking atonal score.

The festival closes with a special musical interpretation of Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bester Quartet.

The ICA partners with the Garden Cinema to present a 12-film retrospective curated by Instituto Rouanet, commemorating 60 years of L.C. Barreto Film Productions, Brazil’s legendary production company, helmed by the renowned family of filmmakers.

The subject of one of Jacques Rivette's most famous essays for Cahiers du cinéma, Roberto Rossellini's tale of marital strife in the Neapolitan countryside is a groundbreaking work of modernism and a heartbreaking anatomy of a relationship.

Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s impassioned adaptation of the novel by Graciliano Ramos, which follows an itinerant family traversing a drought-stricken sertão of northeastern Brazil, is considered one of the most important works of Brazilian cinema.

Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press and Xiaolu Guo will discuss recent films by Banner, and their shared interest in the slippages of language and conflict. Banner will present two recent short films along with as a selection of earlier works including Pranayama Organ (2021).

January 2020. A film crew reunites near Wuhan to resume the shooting of a film halted ten years earlier, only to share the unexpected challenges as cities are placed under lockdown.

Freely inspired by Balzac's novella Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu and featuring outstanding performances from Michael Piccoli, Emmanuelle Béart and Jane Birkin, Rivette's exploration of the artistic process and the at times tempestuous relationship between artist and model is a profoundly moving examination of the creative process and artistic obsession.

Bruno Barreto was 20 years old when he injected new life into Brazilian cinema and announced Sônia Braga to the world with this sensuous comedy-fantasy, based on the brilliant Jorge Amado’s 1966 novel. Co-starring José Wilker (Bye Bye Brazil) and featuring music by Chico Buarque.

Huw Wahl’s compelling analogue exploration of engineless sailing.

In Déa Kulumbegashvili’s second feature, an obstetrician’s secret abortion work in rural Georgia is exposed after a tragedy, threatening her purpose and freedom.

Leonardo van Dijl's debut feature is a taut study of a young athlete in crisis.

A celebration of the extraordinary life of Irish writer Edna O'Brien.

Assembled from footage shot over a span of more than twenty years, Jia Zhangke crafts a boundless story of enduring but fragile love, anchored by the eternally captivating presence of Zhao Tao. The screening on 11 April is followed by a conversation between Tony Rayns and Simon Field.

18 year-old Totone spends his time drinking and partying in the Jura region of France, until reality catches up to him, and he must find a way to make a living to care for his 7 year-old sister.

A revelatory inside-look at John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s life in Greenwich Village in the early 1970s, from Academy Award-winner Kevin Macdonald.

A vividly unsettling mixture of sexploitation sleaze and hard-boiled melodrama, Bruno Barreto’s follow-up to Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands centres on a doomed romance set against the backdrop of a wanton killing spree in Rio’s Copacabana.

A police chief is sent to a diamond mine to stop a tyrannical inspector. While travelling through the forest, he becomes involved in a tragic love affair with a beautiful indigenous girl.

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.

Luiz Carlos Barreto’s directorial debut—assembled from hundreds of hours of footage with Cinema Novo editor Eduardo Escorel (Entranced Earth, Macunaíma, among many others)—tells the story of the Brazilian team’s first three World Cup wins with the record-breaking footballer as its protagonist.

January 2020. A film crew reunites near Wuhan to resume the shooting of a film halted ten years earlier, only to share the unexpected challenges as cities are placed under lockdown.

Arguably one of the greatest films about soccer, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s debut feature is a form-shifting documentary portrait of his country’s beloved bow-legged dribbler Mané Garrincha.

A Tokyo factory worker’s online side business descends into paranoia and dread, in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's (Pulse and Cure) moody thriller exploring technology’s dark grip on human behaviour and morality.

A burglar and the owner of a house he attempts to rob journey across Vietnam to the homeowner’s wife’s grave where he wishes to join her. 

For the first instalment of his ambitious yet restrained two-part study of Jeanne d'Arc, Jacques Rivette surveys the revelatory period where Jeanne met with royalty, joined the army, and led the French into battle against the English.

A programme of recent artists’ moving image, exploring processes of self-discovery, curated by Abirami Logendran and Morgan Quaintance. From sexual liberation to states of heightened awareness reached through physical practice, the programme is punctuated by recordings of James Baldwin reading from his classic novel Giovanni’s Room.  

Based on Graciliano Ramos’s posthumously published memoirs, this extraordinarily ambitious film from Nelson Pereira dos Santos centres on Ramos (Carlos Vereza) sinking ever deeper into a bizarre nightmare after he is locked up with other political prisoners in Rio de Janeiro and then, eventually, with all stripes of inmates on a remote island.

Rooted in the poetics and quotidian details of daily life, the second part of Rivette's diptych on the life of Jeanne d'Arc, traces every step on the road to Jeanne’s saintly fate, from her waning influence in the courts to her imprisonment and death.

Set in 1950s–60s Rio amid Brazil’s brewing military coup, the turbulent relationship between American poet Elizabeth Bishop (Miranda Otto) and architect Lota de Macedo Soares (Glória Pires) offers a unique perspective on this period in Brazil’s history.

The open space for non-fiction cinema returns for its 15th edition.

An insight into the private estate of Leni Riefenstahl, who became world-famous with her Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, but continually denied any closer ties to the regime.

A special programme of eight films celebrating the work of award-winning Iranian film and theatre actress Fatemeh Motamed-Arya.

The ill-prepared crew of an American documentary production stumble into a rural town in Argentina in pursuit of their next viral story, and things spiral into from bathos into trendy mayhem.

A 17-year-old girl joins her father and his friend on a forest hike, where quiet tensions mount. An assured portrayal of restraint and rupture, featuring a standout lead performance.

A poetic exploration of Eileen Gray’s life and visionary design, unveiling the story behind her iconic modernist house, a record of art and resilience by the sea.

A satirical look at the frenzied professional and romantic lives of the staff of a daytime TV show. Screening on a 16mm print from the ICA archive.

Yeong-gyeong and Su-hwan meet at a wedding party. He carries her home after she passes out drunk. Kang Mi-ja's Spring Night is a stark and graceful depiction of a doomed kinship. 

Through an intimate reconstruction of an important phone call, Iva Radivojević’s evocative film investigates dislocation and the nature of remembering. Followed by an in-person Q&A with filmmaker Iva Radivojević.

Celina Escher’s documentary follows Teodora and The Seventeen – a group of women accused of murder because of having a miscarriage in El Salvador - in their struggle to regain their freedom from prison.

Commissioned to create a documentary about Argentine art collective Mondongo, filmmaker
Mariano Llinás crafts an experimental portrait of friendship, failure and self-destruction.

An essayistic exploration into the lasting ecological consequences of Belgium’s colonial rule in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.