Around the world in melodrama: 9 countries, 45 essential films

In the cinema of mainland China, melodrama has traditionally provided a framework for tackling myriad social issues, from struggles against oppression to family disputes to economic disparity. Its heartrending narratives have also catapulted actresses such as Ruan Lingyu, Wei Wei, Gong Li and Zhou Dongyu to stardom. 

China’s appropriation of the genre flourished through the leftist productions of the 1930s, with The Goddess (1934), New Women (1935) and Street Angel (1937) commenting on social inequalities while allowing an audience of urban workers to experience cathartic resolutions. In the post-war era, peak emotionality was achieved by Cai Chusheng’s stirring epic The Spring River Flows East (1947), which chronicles the travails of a family during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War. Conversely, the family portrait in Spring in a Small Town (1948) is a profoundly melancholic rendition of melodrama with the requisite elements played in an atypically restrained register.

Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the genre was repurposed to serve socialist ideals. Xie Jin directed two notable melodramas of this type: The Red Detachment of Women (1961) and Two Stage Sisters (1964). The former concerns a company of female soldiers, while the latter follows two female opera performers whose paths ultimately converge with the direction of the nation. When China underwent another transformation in the ‘reform and opening up’ era, Xie crafted the deeply compassionate Hibiscus Town (1987), wherein a strong-willed village woman strives to maintain her dignity throughout the Cultural Revolution.

As China re-joined the world, melodrama was integral to its international cinematic presence. Zhang Yimou’s ravishing period pieces Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991) symbolically critique the inherent cruelty of patriarchal systems, culminating in fiercely charged climaxes. Focusing on the tragic relationship between two Peking Opera stars, Chen Kaige’s decades-spanning Farewell My Concubine (1993) presents the theme of unrequited love in a heightened manner through elaborate make-up, opulent costumes and stylised gestures. The expressionistic sensibilities of these films enabled them to transcend cultural boundaries in the global arthouse market.

Today, China’s melodramas cater primarily to domestic audiences seeking topicality: Better Days (2019) tackles high school bullying, Sister (2021) addresses gender bias, and We Girls (2025) highlights social prejudice towards female ex-convicts. Such pertinent films illustrate how this adaptable genre continues to explore China’s evolving values while delivering the anticipated emotional fireworks.

– John Berra

• The Goddess – Wu Yonggang, 1934

• Spring in a Small Town – Fei Mu, 1948

• Hibiscus Town – Xie Jin, 1987

• Raise the Red Lantern – Zhang Yimou, 1991

• Sister – Yin Ruoxi, 2021

Melodrama has been a staple of Japanese cinema since its very beginning. It has its origins in shinpa, or modern theatre, which was heavily influenced by Western plays and attempted to break away from traditional performance styles such as kabuki. Shinpa-influenced cinema eventually became synonymous with ‘melodrama’ and was directly opposed by the Pure Film Movement, which rejected it on the grounds of its theatricality and overly broad emotions along with its focus on female suffering under a patriarchal superstructure.

Nevertheless, it proved popular with audiences and eventually evolved into the ‘women’s pictures’ of later eras. During the 1920s, women were going to see films in increasing numbers, and it became the norm for female roles to be played by actresses rather than by actors. To court a new female audience, studios began producing films led by the new female stars that were set in the domestic space or focused on the changing place of women in the contemporary society. This was in contrast to samurai movies, which generally revolved around violent conflict and were more directly aimed at men.

Though melodrama remained popular throughout the 1930s, it was in the post-war era that it came into its own as the nation attempted to reckon with its recent past and a newly democratic society. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Keisuke Kinoshita’s Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), which stars Hideko Takamine as a school teacher watching over her first class of pupils from the late 1920s through an era of rising militarism to the war and its aftermath.

Takamine was also a muse to Mikio Naruse, starring in Floating Clouds (1955) and several other of his best-known films. Closely associated with women’s pictures, Naruse worked with Kinuyo Tanaka in films like Ginza Cosmetics (1951), though she herself was muse to chronicler of female suffering Kenji Mizoguchi until she went on to direct female-focused films of her own, including The Eternal Breasts (1955). 

Kozaburo Yoshimura was another director who specialised in female stories, for example in Night River (1956), which starred Fujiko Yamamoto. He made a number of films with Machiko Kyo, who plays the geisha in Clothes of Deception (1951) and starred in Mizoguchi’s final feature, Street of Shame (1956). 

Melodrama’s popularity faded with the decline of the studio system in the 1960s, though Heinosuke Gosho’s Hunting Rifle (1961), starring Fujiko Yamamoto and Mariko Okada, is a comparatively late entry in the career of a master of the genre, with its Sirkian tale of love triangles, destructive affairs and frustrated longing.

– Hayley Scanlon

• The Ball at the Anjo House – Kozaburo Yoshimura, 1947

• The Life of Oharu – Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952

• She Was like a Wild Chrysanthemum – Keisuke Kinoshita, 1955

• Early Spring – Yasujiro Ozu, 1956

• When a Woman Ascends the Stairs – Mikio Naruse, 1960

Hollywood melodrama is a notoriously difficult genre to pin down – in fact, critics didn’t even properly begin using the classification until the 1970s, significantly after its mid-century heyday. The films could have contemporary or historical settings, and often converged with other genres, such as noir and westerns. The source material was anything from the flimsiest of pulp fiction to the lauded novels of John Steinbeck and Edna Ferber.

Nevertheless, certain themes and stylistic flourishes abounded. There were sprawling family dramas with black sheep aplenty; stories of forbidden love and secret offspring. Many movies were centred around the weighing of personal desire against societal prejudices, and characters having to decide if they could afford to go against the grain in order to live the lives they wanted. Though the visual trappings were often highly artificial, the music blowsy, the narratives fanciful and the dialogue overripe, the issues these films were tackling, and the emotions they elicited, could be very real.

Melodrama is more or less as old as Hollywood itself, with much of silent pioneer D.W. Griffith’s filmography and the great silent films of Frank Borzage falling under the genre’s banner. The peak, however, spanned the first three decades of the sound era. A number of major melodramas – Back Street (1932, 1941, 1961), Magnificent Obsession (1935, 1954) and Imitation of Life (1934, 1959) among them – were remade several times in relatively quick succession during that period, reflecting the changing tastes in styles and social mores.

The 1930s were dominated by the era of the ‘women’s picture’, stars such as Barbara Stanwyck and Claudette Colbert regularly sacrificing their happiness on the altar of societal propriety. World War II and the infusion of other genres (primarily noir) made their mark on the melodramas of the 1940s. And in the 1950s, the melodrama’s overheated emotions positively boiled over into full Technicolor, the films of directors such as Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli granting audiences luscious, vivid escapism.

After that mid-century glut, the fire hydrant spray slowed to a trickle. There’ve been only a handful of notable entries in each decade since: Love Story (1970), The Way We Were (1973), Terms of Endearment (1983) and Steel Magnolias (1989) are a few significant examples. 

While Hollywood melodrama has never threatened to return to what it once was, it’s also retained a spark of life into the new millennium, with Far from Heaven (2002), Carol (2015) and May December (2023) making Todd Haynes the deserved inheritor of Sirk’s crown. Though significantly less acclaimed, even the current storm of Colleen Hoover adaptations owes something to the genre’s traditions.

– Chloe Walker

• Stella Dallas – King Vidor, 1937

• The Heiress – William Wyler, 1949

• Johnny Guitar – Nicholas Ray, 1954

• All That Heaven Allows – Douglas Sirk, 1955

• May December – Todd Haynes, 2023

Between the mid-1930s and the late-1950s, Mexico enjoyed what is often referred to as a cinematic golden age. During this period, a perfect storm of social and geopolitical factors – economic boom, rapid urbanisation, US trade restrictions against other countries in the region – combined to create the ideal conditions for Mexico to become Latin America’s bustling hub for film production.

Within this context, melodrama came to occupy a special role. At a time when the Mexican state was consolidating its post-revolutionary identity and dealing with rapid social change, cinema was tasked with producing a cohesive national image. The heightened emotions, romantic mythmaking and moralistic storylines provided by this most extra of genres, were perfectly suited to the task. Stories of family, sacrifice and redemption served to reinforce Catholic values and patriarchal structures, but crucially the genre also provided a safe space to push against those ideals, offering subtle critiques of social mobility, class and gender roles.

By the 1940s, the Mexican studio system – modelled on Hollywood and driven by all-conquering star personas – was in full force. While male stars such as Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante were a consistent presence, it was powerful women, like Dolores del Río, María Félix, and later Ninón Sevilla and Miroslava Stern, who truly defined the era. While often cast in archetypal roles (the self-sacrificing mother, the virtuous wife, the fallen woman) these stars conveyed a charismatic strength that contradicted this rigid moral order. Stern, for instance, may have often played poised, morally ambiguous beauties – a social climbing trophy wife in Trotacalles (1951), a snobbish heiress in Stronger than Love (1955) – but a distinctive combination of sly intelligence and repressed desire lent her anti-heroines a complexity that ran counter to punitive storylines. 

Many melodramas of this period also boasted fabulous musical set pieces, which allowed performers to express the full force of their talent. In the noirish Victims of Sin (1951), for example, Sevilla’s showstopping dance performances elevate an otherwise tragic heroine to transcendence, providing an astonishing showcase for the Cuban-born star’s spectacular abilities.

While the era’s best-known filmmakers are invariably men – notable names include directors Roberto Gavaldón and Emilio Fernández and the cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa – several women also stand out. In 1937, Adela Sequeyro became the first woman to make a sound film in Mexico when she wrote, directed and starred in La mujer de nadie, a fascinatingly progressive story centring a heroine who rejects marriage and pursues bohemian thrills. 

Matilde Landeta’s Trotacalles (1951), about two sisters separated by brutal class divides, is another bold example, particularly notable for its sympathetic portrayal of its sex worker characters. But perhaps the most overlooked artist here is Gloria Schoemann, a prolific editor and frequent collaborator with Fernández and Figueroa. Her impressive output – she edited 230 films across a 40-year career – puts forward a compelling case for Schoemann as a key underappreciated architect of the golden age.

– Camilla Baier and Rachel Pronger

• La mujer de nadie (Nobody’s Wife) – Adela Sequeyro, 1937

• La otra (The Other One) – Roberto Gavaldón, 1946

• Trotacalles (Streetwalker) – Matilde Landeta, 1951

• Víctimas del pecado (Victims of Sin) – Emilio Fernández, 1951

• Más fuerte que el amor (Stronger than Love) – Tulio Demicheli, 1955

Invisible Women are currently presenting the nationwide touring programme Stronger Than Love: ¡Too Much Mexican Melodrama!

British cinema’s take on melodrama begins, as with so many other things in British culture, with class. Rich and poor faced off in the stage melodramas that provided the foundation for subsequent films, with wicked squires, played by the likes of Tod Slaughter, doing wrong by a whole string of innocent lowly maidens. But probably Britain’s two most significant early endowments in the development of screen melodrama were the literary inspiration provided by Charles Dickens and the world-conquering combination of humour and pathos that was Charlie Chaplin’s hallmark. Both artists made vivid the cruelties and injustices perpetrated against the downtrodden lower classes, and neither were shy about using this as the engine for powerful melodrama.

Later generations felt uncomfortable with the outright sentimentality of old-school Victorian melodrama, as its ethos came into conflict with a more restrained, emotionally reticent national ideal. But wouldn’t that create a certain incompatibility between the British ‘stiff upper lip’ and the all-out emotional expressivity of melodrama? The most triumphant riposte to this is provided by Brief Encounter (1945), one of the most resonant melodramas in film history, which hinges on the interaction between low-key everyday middle-class life and the jolting dislocation of an unexpected love affair: “I didn’t think such violent things could happen to ordinary people,” the distraught heroine confides in her intimate voice-over narration. 

Many other British melodramas have used that same tension between passionate intensity trying to burst out and the counter-impulse to repress or conceal it as the wellspring of their drama, including Merchant Ivory’s The Remains of the Day (1993) – indeed, the period dramas associated with the Merchant Ivory team are one of the most important places where British film melodrama resides – and more recently films of love and loss such as Aftersun (2022) and All of Us Strangers (2023), packing an emotional punch strong enough to leave audiences weeping.

However, the company most strongly associated with British film melodrama is undoubtedly Gainsborough Studios, who cannily realised that historical bodice-rippers would provide the respite from contemporary life’s deprivations and struggles craved by 1940s audiences, especially female filmgoers. The most popular Gainsborough melodrama of them all was The Wicked Lady (1945) in which Margaret Lockwood threw caution and constraint to the wind and donned the disguise of a highwayman, dallying with Byronic fellow robber James Mason. Lockwood’s wicked lady may have received her comeuppance by the end of the film, but she had a lot of outrageous melodramatic fun before she got there, and audiences revelled in it.

– Melanie Williams

• Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn – Milton Rosmer, 1935

• Brief Encounter – David Lean, 1945

• The Wicked Lady – Leslie Arliss, 1945

• The Remains of the Day – James Ivory, 1993

• Aftersun – Charlotte Wells, 2022

As you might expect from the birthplace of opera, the home of Verdi, Puccini and D’Annunzio, Italian cinema has always specialised in melodrama, and since the silent era most Italian filmmakers have embraced the form in one way or another.

With its lavish sets, hundreds of extras, volcanic set pieces and floweriest of flowery intertitles by ‘decadent’ novelist Gabriele D’Annunzio, Cabiria (1914) set the standard for the historical melodrama and was to become a key influence for Hollywood filmmakers such as D.W. Griffith. Around the same time, pioneering and prolific Naples-based director, producer and distributor Elvira Notari was making contemporary urban melodramas that appealed to local audiences, such as 1922’s ‘A Santanotte.

While Italian cinema of the 1940s is strongly associated with neorealism, the trend only ever accounted for a small part of the country’s overall film production. A few notable neorealist titles proved popular with audiences – Rome, Open City (1945) and Bicycle Thieves (1948), for instance – but the genres that did consistently well at the box office were comedies and melodramas. Critic-turned-filmmaker Raffaello Matarazzo specialised in the ‘strappalacrime’ (tearjerker), which typically featured the star duo of Amedeo Nazzari and Yvonne Sanson, with titles such as the 1949 hit Chains in which a working class Neapolitan family is threatened by the appearance of the mother’s former boyfriend. 

The stark earthiness of neorealists such as Rossellini was frequently pitted against the excess of melodramas by the likes of Matarazzo, but there was one Italian filmmaker who managed to brilliantly combine the two. From his first feature Ossessione (1943) to Technicolor historical drama Senso (1954) to royal biopic Ludwig (1973), Luchino Visconti committed fully to the sensuous, melodramatic mode without overdosing on the gloss of Matarazzo or, indeed, certain Hollywood melodramas. 

It’s a lesson learned by contemporary auteur Luca Guadagnino, whose I Am Love  (2009) tells of a doomed affair among the Milanese bourgeoisie and which, according to critic Neil Young, “seems affected, perhaps even in-fected, by the sublime thrills of amour fou”.

Seemingly a world away from Visconti’s upper-class and aristocratic melodramas, the 1970s and 80s saw the cinematic revival of the ‘sceneggiata’, a form of working-class melodrama that had its roots in early 20th-century Neapolitan theatre and which combined heart-wrenching plots with musical performance, action and comedy. The undisputed ‘King of the Sceneggiata’ was Mario Merola, a hugely popular barrel-chested singer-turned-actor who would often play a stoic, blue-collar patriarch forced to defend his family from nefarious outside forces. 

In the 1980s, a younger generation of singer-songwriters took on the tradition of the ‘sceneggiata’, including the boyish, blond-haired Nino D’Angelo. In his first film, 1981’s Celebrità, he plays an apprentice mechanic whose dreams of becoming a music star see him get tangled up in organised crime. D’Angelo’s extraordinary career is chronicled in recent documentary Nino. 18 Days (2025), directed and narrated by his filmmaker son Toni.

– Pasquale Iannone

• Cabiria – Giovanni Pastrone, 1914
• Chains (Catene) – Raffaello Matarazzo, 1949
• Senso – Luchino Visconti, 1954
• Celebrità – Ninì Grassia, 1981
• I Am Love – Luca Guadagnino, 2009

Nollywood is melodrama. Joined together at the hip from the get go, the Nigerian film industry and melodrama have become so intertwined as to become inextricable from the other. Think heightened emotions layered on thick, theatrical performances, with sensational plots focused on the domestic? You have arrived at Nollywood central.

The Nollywood boom grew from a patchwork of scrappy individuals telling relatable stories of love, loss and deception in the early 1990s to a formidable behemoth globally recognised for its glamour and productivity today. The early Nollywood films, told with passionate gusto, reflected the lived realities of an audience who were desperate for familiar onscreen representation. It didn’t matter how lurid the themes, how sensational the plot details or how technically deficient the productions. They were a hit.

Nollywood’s first major success, 1992’s Living in Bondage, was a proper melodrama. A desperate man driven by greed murders his wife in exchange for instant riches. Her avenging spirit then haunts him right back. Directed by Chris Obi Rapu, Living in Bondage has grand betrayal, infidelity, madness, revenge. Even the title hints of drama. The success of Living in Bondage would mark the birth of an industry that embraced melodramatic tenets as a feature rather than a bug. The films that followed were culturally sensitive, socially relevant and delivered in a mix of English and local languages. They were also available in the VHS format, the technology most accessible at the time.

Nollywood’s melodrama instincts can be traced to a combination of oral storytelling traditions, travelling theatre troupes and television as well as foreign influences, including soap operas sourced from India, Mexico and Brazil. The Christian evangelical movement supplied the underlying dogma. In these films, bad deeds were punished and most problems could be solved by prayer. “To God be the glory” was a recurring end credits sign off.

Filmmakers sought to minimise budgets and maximise profits, and mogul marketers stepped in to take charge of the economics. A star system similar to Hollywood soon took shape. Popular stars like Genevieve Nnaji, Liz Benson and Ramsey Nouah began to develop onscreen personas that had audiences returning for more. This period of peak commerciality that started around the late 1990s came to a close in 2004 when a group of marketers banned some of the most in-demand onscreen talent from working for a year. The marketers claimed the stars were undisciplined and making unrealistic demands, but it was ultimately about control of a struggling system. 

Plagued by piracy and downloads, the video market collapsed in the 2010s, and theatre screens returned to Nigeria. The medium might have changed, but the DNA of Nollywood storytelling has remained rooted in the excesses of melodrama. Recent box office juggernauts like The Wedding Party (2016) and A Tribe Called Judah (2023) are proof that the genre is thriving still.

– Wilfred Okiche

• Living in Bondage – Chris Obi Rapu, 1992

• Blood Sister – Tchidi Chikere, 2003

• Jenifa – Muhydeen S. Ayinde, 2008

• The Meeting – Mildred Okwo, 2012

• King of Boys – Kemi Adetiba, 2018

If there’s one genre that the storied Egyptian cinema is best known for, it’s melodrama. Theatre had the strongest influence on early Egyptian films – both in their didactic moral messages and in the heightened emotionality of their narratives. Yet the enduring relationship between melodrama and Egyptian cinema might be rooted in the fundamental spirit of the country: the fiery temperament, the vivacious modes of expression, and the religious belief in divine intervention.

The evolution of melodrama in Egyptian cinema was simultaneously a byproduct of the growing sophistication of a film industry finding its unique voice and a result of radical social and political changes – too acute for any other genre, including realism, to accommodate or reflect.

Class, feudalism, patriarchy and the conflict between tradition and modernity became more pronounced in the aftermath of the 1952 revolution, which transformed Egypt from a British-backed monarchy into a military-run republic. The severity of censorship ebbed and flowed over the decades but never disappeared under any regime. Melodrama, in this respect, became the most fitting vehicle for channelling the repressed anger, bottled desires, frustration, and, at times, despair of a nation that has never been in control of its destiny – a nation that made a habit of spinning tall tales to compensate for an unattainable earthly justice and thwarted liberty.

Less psychologically driven than Hollywood and more stylistically and visually restrained than Bollywood, Egyptian melodramas absorbed every conceivable genre – musicals, action, noir, fantasy and even comedy.

In their simplest incarnations, the popularity of Egyptian melodramas across the region was partly driven by the instant gratifications these star-driven vehicles offered in abundance. The scorching romances of pre-Hollywood Omar Sharif and his wife Faten Hamama; the musical weepies of iconic singers Abdel Halim Hafez and Farid al-Atrash; the working-class actioners of Farid Shawqi – Egyptian melodramas gave the region a sense of unity at a time when most member states were beginning to carve out new identities, separate from their former European colonisers.

The artifice and shrieking mawkishness of the 1930s were gradually replaced by disarming earnestness and sharp perceptiveness in the succeeding decades, realised with varying tonal registers. By the 1980s, melodrama collided with the decade-defining neorealist wave to pose difficult questions about the loss of collectiveness in a newly capitalist society.

Above all, however, melodramas were conceived as ideal vehicles for promoting the new independent Egyptian woman. The angry tragedies of Henry Barakat, the sizzling literary adaptations of Ezz El Dine Zulficar, the garish entertainments of Hassan al-Imam, and the suave, sex-positive dramas of Hussein Kamal explored diverse facets of the modern Egyptian woman in her incessant battle against archaic family structures.

The grand subversion of melodrama over the past decade mirrors the mutable attitude of a country too hard-hearted to buy into the innocent sentimentality of yore – a country governed by a new, crude regime that has staunchly stood against any critical or unpolished representation of current reality.

Melodramas may now be frowned upon, but for more than 80 years, they have been the modus operandi of Egyptian cinema. Melodrama is not merely a mode of expression – it is the soul of Egypt.

– Joseph Fahim

• The Nightingale’s Prayer – Henry Barakat, 1959

• The River of Love – Ezz El Dine Zulficar, 1960

• Story of a Whole Life – Helmy Halim, 1965

• Watch Out for ZouZou – Hassan al-Imam, 1972

• My Love… Always – Hussein Kamal, 1980

Music and ‘excessive’ emotion were at the heart of India’s mainstream Hindi/Urdu cinema during the decades around Independence and Partition in 1947. Extreme conflict (whether internal, psychic and spiritual, or external and social) mingles with song and dance to take characters and audiences on an unparalleled emotional rollercoaster. 

Melodrama has long been associated with this Mumbai-based industry in particular – both as its strength and its weakness – but it also operates elsewhere in India’s Tamil, Malayalam and Bengali language production hubs. Often high pitched and viscerally intense, these films weave together family conflict, irreparable losses, thwarted love and generational trauma. They keep heightened emotion firmly within the field of vision.

Thinking about melodrama (taken from the Greek for music/melos and drama/conflict) makes particular sense when looking at the work of directors such as Guru Dutt, Mehboob Khan and Raj Kapoor, whose films stand out for their emotional and ethical intensity and for the beauty, immediacy and selflessness of their protagonists. Though each director was distinctive in their style and obsessions, they were united in an unstinting reimagining of love, marriage and family along the faultlines of post-colonial realities and change. You couldn’t watch these films and not be implicated in the choices these characters make. 

In these hands the social drama (socially inflected melodrama) reaches unparalleled heights. Movies like Andaz (1949), Awaara (1951), Pyaasa (1957), Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962) and Sangam (1964) represent an incredible flowering of stories that distil and unpack desire and fantasy while articulating socio-political and cultural pressures or dilemmas with unusual force and complexity.

Politics was never far from the surface during this golden age of Indian cinema. Many of its greatest lyricists and writers were members of the Progressive Writers’ Association, who worked hard to forge a modernist conscience for independent India. From Kaifi Azmi to Majrooh Sultanpuri, these writers didn’t borrow passively from Western cinema. They innovated. They searched their souls and the world around them to give audiences dramas that reflected the dilemmas of their lives and – certainly while the optimism lasted – a new vision of social relations.

The centrality of music and song to Indian cinema of this period means that composers, lyricists and playback singers were (and remain) household names. Actors rarely did the singing for themselves (Noor Jehan was a notable exception) and were frequently matched with playback doubles who became part of their screen persona, as was the case with Dilip Kumar and Mukesh. 

As much as directors or stars, the golden age of Hindi-Urdu melodrama relied on music directors such as S.D. Burman, lyricists like Gulzar Sahib or Kaifi Azmi, and singers including Asha Bhosle, Mohammad Rafi, Mukesh and Lata Mangeshkar. Quite literally, without the music – or melos – the drama is unimaginable.

– Nasheed Qamar Faruqi

• Andaz – Mehboob Khan, 1949

• Awaara – Raj Kapoor, 1951

• Pyaasa – Guru Dutt, 1957

• Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam – Abrar Alvi, 1962

• Pakeezah – Kamal Amrohi, 1972

Too Much: Melodrama on Film is a celebration of melodrama, at BFI Southbank, in cinemas UK wide and on BFI Player from October to December.