Against the Grain: 1980s British Cinema

Alan Clarke’s screen adaptation of playwright Andrea Dunbar’s uninhibited portrait of working-class life caused outrage at the time and reset the debate about class and representation on screen.

The ground-breaking first feature from the director of Orlando and The Tango Lesson, The Gold Diggers is a key film of early '80s feminist cinema.

Who would have thought that this small budget film made for Channel 4 from a script by a then unknown writer about a young Pakistani Londoner (Gordon Warnecke), his ambitions for his uncle’s laundrette and his developing relationship with a skinhead (Daniel Day-Lewis in a breakthrough role) would become one of the most successful and iconic films of the 80s?

Neil Jordan’s strikingly poetic debut feature explores the numbing violence of the Troubles starring actor Stephen Rea as Saxophonist Danny, one of the first films commissioned by Channel 4.

Following a fatal car crash involving a swan outside a zoo, twin-brother zoologists Oliver and Oswald become fascinated by the processes of decay.

Structured around fourteen of Shakespeare's sonnets read by Judi Dench, Derek Jarman’s film is an exploration of love and desire between two men.

Made with an all female crew, Sally Potter’s (Orlando, The Tango Lesson) ground-breaking first feature is a key film of early ‘80s feminist cinema.

Join director Stephen Frears, writer Hanif Kureishi and actor Gordon Warnecke for this 40th anniversary showing of the delightfully transgressive My Beautiful Laundrette, the story of two lovers attempting to open a glamorous laundromat amid the turbulence of life in Thatcher’s Britain.

This stylish and inventive comedy thriller stars Lucy Sheen as Elaine, a young law clerk, tasked with executing the will of Chinatown businessman Sam Wong who has died in mysterious circumstances.

A groundbreaking experimental film essay on race and disorder in Britain, filmed by John Akomfrah from the Black Audio Film Collective in Birmingham and London during the riots of 1985.

Set in the declining North Shields fishing industry, this drama came out of the Channel 4 supported workshop movement and clearly prefigures the localised work of contemporary filmmakers such as Mark Jenkin, with its focus on the realities of marginalised communities.

Film Historian Professor Ian Christie, who contributed to Channel 4's Vision series, will talk about the impact it made in film culture in the UK and his own work on programmes about Jean Luc Godard and Raul Ruiz.

Secrets, lies, communism and loyalty all loom large in this criminally underseen British political thriller shot by a young Roger Deakins starring Gabriel Byrne in one of his early leading roles.

Set against a backdrop of emerging teen culture and rising racial tension in late 50s London, Colin MacInnes' cult novel is brought to the screen in Julien Temple's exuberant musical adaptation. This is a Relaxed Screening.

Set against a backdrop of emerging teen culture and rising racial tension in late 50s London, Colin MacInnes' cult novel is brought to the screen in Julien Temple's exuberant musical adaptation with a who's who cast of music luminaries from Bowie and Ray Davies to Sade.