Episode list

Nagisa Oshima explores the first century of Japanese cinema.

Theatre director and documentary filmmaker Donald Taylor Black contributes a thoughtful essay about Ireland's need to make images of itself for itself.

Director Stephen Frears casts a subjective eye over British cinema, from World War Two, the 1960s and the emergence of working-class voices, to the erratic 1980s, where spectacular success and catastrophic failure go hand in hand.

150 German filmmakers of all generations are led through a fictitious ultramodern Cinema of Time, where they can experience a taste of what ambience and technology can offer.

A Brazilian director goes to Mexico city to study the great Mexican melodramas of old. He meets a student he had previously met in Brazil and he becomes his assistant. But the student begins to miss the projections, behaving mysteriously. The director suspects something strange must be happening. But he will only find that out back in Brazil... Investigation about the melodrama myths, paying homage to South America cinema, especially the Mexican, in the 1930s until the 1950s, when Mexican moviemaking had stars like Maria Felix and Dolores Del Rio. The film took part in the British project celebrating the 100 Years of Cinema.

Martin Scorsese describes his initial and growing obsession with films from the 1940s and 50s as the art form developed and grew with clips from classics and cult classics.

At a lakeside hotel, Michel Piccoli discusses the centennial of cinema with Jean-Luc Godard. Godard asks why should cinema's birthday be celebrated when the history of film is a forgotten subject. Through the remainder of his hotel stay, Piccoli tests Godard's hypothesis.

A personal journey through Sam Neill's childhood and memories.

Anyone desiring a quick introduction to or stimulating recap of Scandinavian cinema will find "I Am Curious, Film" a very seductive initiation.

The Cameroonian film, a meta-discourse on cinema, tackles the state and direction of cinema in the continent, the dominance of non-African works on African screens, and the clear absence of African films on the silver screens.

Australian born film maker George (Mad Max) Miller offers a personal view of Australian films. He suggests that they can be regarded as visual music, public dreaming, mythology, and song-lines. In extrapolating the idea of movies as song-lines he examines feature films under the following categories : songs of the land ; the bushman ; the convicts ; the bush-rangers ; mates and larrikins ; the digger ; pommy bashing ; the sheilas ; gays ; the wogs ; blackfellas ; urban subversion. He then concludes that these films can be thought of as "Hymns that sing of Australia".

Stanley Kwan examines queer themes in Chinese film for this insightful documentary, produced for the British Film Institute's "Century of Cinema" series. Using film clips, personal recollections, and interviews with film luminaries (including Ang Lee, Tsui Hark, Chen Kaige and Leslie Cheung), Kwan demonstrates how Chinese cinema has challenged gender norms for years, while asserting his own sexuality in a poignant conversation with his mother.