UK

The most riveting real-life television series of them all began 42 years ago with the documentary 7 Up, about the expectations of a group of seven-year-old British children. Meet them again, at 49.

Diversity is the word this year in our annual collage of animated gems – films that dare you to reach out and run your hands over the textures of paint and pencil.

We revisit British director Mike Newell’s 1982 dramatisation of the 12-day manhunt for mass-murderer Stanley Graham on New Zealand's remote West Coast.

Eye-opening documentary explores the world coffee trade – from the glitzy World Barista Champs to the Ethiopian farmers who grow the world’s finest coffee but live in near starvation.

Documentary inspired by the experience of artist Hugues de Montalembert, who was blinded by muggers in 1978. “A film about blindness that makes us see the world hungrily, deeply, anew.” — Daily Telegraph

This year’s Digital Space programme stretches its wings to take a broader view than ever of the continually evolving world of digital animation.

A 14-year-old boy adjusts to the horrors of life in a Nazi death camp. “The eerie beauty of Lajos Koltai’s child’s-eye view of the Holocaust as it sank its teeth into Hungary in 1944 is profound." — The Times

Public school prat Nick Broomfield attempts to catch up with Eugene Terre’Blanche, leader of the South African neo-Nazi party and subject of his earlier documentary.

A young Indian doctor immigrates to England in 1965, leaving behind his distraught family. Forty years later, his daughter tells their moving story, using period Super-8 footage.

Provocative documentary explores the legacy of Nazi death camp Mauthausen in Austria, which now functions as a major contributor to the local tourist economy.

Joan Plowright is the 70-something widow who befriends an aspiring young writer in this refreshing look at a friendship that transcends age to focus on kindness and wisdom.

True story of the British Muslim boys who went to Pakistan for a wedding in September 2001 and ended up as tortured prisoners of the US Army. “Ferocious, partisan, and moving.” — The Guardian

Steve Coogan stars in Michael Winterbottom’s po-mo adaptation of Sterne’s bawdy, untamable, 18th-century novel. “The first great, mind-tickling treat of the new movie year” — Entertainment Weekly

Actor Richard E Grant’s touching and funny movie-memoir of his 60s adolescence amongst the British diplomatic community in Swaziland in Southern Africa. With Gabriel Byrne, Emily Watson.

Werner Herzog fashions a sci-fi fantasy of paradise lost around actor Brad Dourif, recutting amazing NASA footage and gorgeous submarine imagery. An unclassifiable oddity.

British social realist Ken Loach picked up the Cannes Palme d’Or for this provocative drama set in County Cork between 1920 and 1922, a dangerous period before the outbreak of civil war in Ireland. “Staggeringly powerful… The Wind That Shakes the Barley had more to say about the world of today than any other film screening in Cannes.” — Scott Foundas, LA Weekly