Free Cinema touring programmes

Three touring programmes of classic British Cinema from the bfi production board.

The BFI funded films for 50 years. To celebrate half a century of innovative film-making bfi Collections is launching three touring programmes of the best of the bfi's early productions.

In February 1956, more than two years before the French New Wave and thirty-nine years before Dogme 95, a group of young film-makers launched their Manifesto at the NFT. They named the programme Free Cinema and took their cameras out onto the streets, capturing a new naturalistic and unscripted look at England. It made such an impact that 400 filmgoers were turned away from the first screening. Forty-five years later, we are pleased to offer two programmes celebrating this crucial moment in British cinema history, 'Free Cinema' and 'The Other Free Cinema'.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the bfi continued and developed its policy of supporting innovative film-making, believing that any vibrant film culture required regular acts of subversion. In the third touring programme - 'Psychedelia and Experiment'- we celebrate some of the most vital films to emerge from this period, dizzying interrogations of the very basis of cinema that offer a wild trip back to the excesses of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Free Cinema

The Other Free Cinema

Psychedelia and Experiment

If you are a cinema or exhibition venue, please see our information about booking these programmes.