101 hidden gems: the greatest films you’ve never seen

Elisabeth is married to a German and has a young daughter. She leaves her husband and child behind to trace the path of women’s rights activist Flora Tristan (1803–1844). The young, French historian takes the train to Lyon, where the early socialist spent the year before her death trying to create a Workers’ Union; ten thousand of them would later join her funeral procession. Elisabeth roams the streets and byways, using a Dictaphone to record the sounds of the city. Her goal is to reconstruct a sense memory of Tristan’s life, and in doing so, she finds the city to be an historical echo chamber: “Maybe I should have become a private detective”. During her research, stroller Elisabeth delves into different time periods. Her search for traces of history is an attempt to construct recorded history as a series of subjective recollections. And at this point in time, Blind Spot has itself become an historical documentation – in dolly shots and stills, the film “inhales” Lyon’s working class neighbourhood of La Croix-Rousse, which has today become the hipster district.

Experimental drama set in London during the Thatcher administration involving four characters: Neil, a science-fiction illustrator; Kim, a woman rock musician; Vermilion, an analyst of satellite photography; and Julian, an old friend of the illustrator who has just finished his Ph.D thesis on the fairy-tales of Charles Perrault. Their four lives are closely interlinked as events happen to each of them.

Two Malian teenagers, Bah and Batrou, from different backgrounds, meet at secondary school. Bah is the descendent of a great tribal chieftain. Batrous father, a provincial military governor, represents the new ruling power. The two teenagers are part of a generation that rejects the established order and challenges the society in which they live.

Hajji Hossein-Gholi Noori (Haji Baba) goes to Washington D.C. as the first Iranian (Persian) ambassador to the United States of America. After he opens the embassy, he is unable to invite statesmen to visit him. Haji fires the embassy staff due to the inability of the Persian government to meet the embassy's needs. One night he is visited by President Grover Cleveland.

Shot over a ten-year period, Diary is not only the political, professional and personal diary of a man, but a testemony that is also a statement on the turbulent reality of a war-torn country, Israel. The six chapters that make up the film take us from Tel Aviv to Paris, then to London and Brazil, where David Perlov was born, and where he decides to return after a twenty-year absence. The film is also a family diary in which Perlov records the coming of age of his two daughters, Yael and Naomi. There are meetings with Claude Lanzman, Isaac Stern, Joris Ivens, Andre Schwartz-Bart, Irving Howe,and Klaus Kinsky. An extraordinary mixture of home movies, political documentary and cinema-verité, Diary is a unique work. The ten years of shooting and five more of editing have resulted in a film which has the spontaneity and apparent arbitrariness of a snapshotbut which is a carefully composed and graded as a finished masterpiece.

The Yangs are betrayed by a government official conspiring with the Mongols. All of the Yang family males except the 5th and 6th brother are killed. Fu Sheng loses his mind after the death of his family, while the other brother takes refuge in a Buddhist temple.

Refusing colonial and masculine readings of the past, Leila, a Lebanese student, travels through time and space, reflecting on 80 years of Middle Eastern history. From the British Mandate to the Lebanese Civil War, she reveals the hidden role of women, and discovers that the Patriarchy also oppresses men.
Shot over seven years, and in often treacherous conditions, Heiny Srour’s film is a masterpiece of filmmaking, mixing together archival footage, fairy-tale storytelling, aesthetically bold imagery, and dramatizations of situations faced by women in Lebanon and Palestine.

From the Medieval period through the Renaissance, Antoinetta Angelidi's experimental work of allegories and aesthetic compositions contemplates the treatment and representation of women in Western art, moving through several historical stages and intertwining them with abstract sequences of perceptions, memoirs and varied perspectives, all of this executed with a very theatrical presentation.

Set in and around the fictional town of Kapua in 1948, Ngāti is the story of a Māori community. The film comprises three narrative threads: a boy, Ropata, is dying of leukaemia; the return of a young Australian doctor, Greg, and his discovery that he has Māori heritage; and the fight to keep the local freezing works open.

1981 Polish film directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski

A bittersweet and nostalgic short drama illustrating the spirit of modern families touched by the experience of migration. Miss T., from the Caribbean, lives alone in her one-room apartment, her children and husband having left her to pursue new dreams. When she dies her family and friends gather at her wake. The tapestry of words that interweave the drama convey the fragments of a life lived, but only partly remembered.

1988 film by Oliver Schmitz

Measures of Distance is a video work comprising several layered elements. Letters written by Hatoum's mother in Beirut to her daughter in London appear as Arabic text moving over the screen and are read aloud in English by Hatoum. The background images are slides of Hatoum's mother in the shower, taken by the artist during a visit to Lebanon. Taped conversations in Arabic between mother and daughter, in which her mother speaks openly about her feelings, her sexuality and her husband's objections to Hatoum's intimate observation of her mother's naked body are intercut with Hatoum's voice in English reading the letters.
Hatoum was born in Beirut to Palestinian parents and became an exile in Britain, during a short visit to London, when war broke out in Lebanon in 1975. She attended art schools in London (Byam Shaw School of Art 1975-9, Slade School of Art 1979-81), where her experience of cultural displacement, both as a woman and an Arab national, informed much of her practice. She made Measures of Distance in Vancouver during a year as artist-in-residence at Western Front Art Centre. It is a Western Front production. Hatoum has said:
Although the main thing that comes across is a very close and emotional relationship between mother and daughter, it also speaks of exile, displacement, disorientation and a tremendous sense of loss as a result of the separation caused by war. In this work I was also trying to go against the fixed identity that is usually implied in the stereotype of Arab woman as passive, mother as non-sexual being … the work is constructed visually in such a way that every frame speaks of literal closeness and implied distance.
(Quoted in Mona Hatoum 1997, p.140).
In the video the decorative Arabic script of Hatoum's mother's letters floats over the images of her body like a veil or barbed wire, preventing total visual access to the image. It both conceals and reveals the woman inhabiting that body, explicating her as an active thinking and feeling being, an image which is emphasised by the frank conversation about her sexuality with her daughter. The Arabic and English parts of the sound-track have been given equal emphasis, 'creating a difficult and alienating situation for a Western audience who have to strain to follow the narrative' (Hatoum in Mona Hatoum 1997, p.140). The work evokes a strong sense of intimacy between a mother and daughter and suggests a creative and transformative relationship through the breaking of taboos around the maternal body. It is through the daughter's art-making project that the mother is able to present herself freely, in a form which cements a bond of identity independent of colonial and patriarchal concerns.

1989 film by Trinh T. Minh-ha

Sandra Bernhard stars in a studio version of her off-Broadway show, blending re-enactments of the original show's pieces with concept vignettes and 'testimonials' to underscore the relationship between a performer and an audience.

A facially disfigured author's life with her guardian of a sister is disrupted when a stranger arrives at their door, claiming to be a fan.

1992 film directed by Idrissa Ouedraogo

1992 film by Euzhan Palcy

Bad Boy Bubby is just that: a bad boy. So bad, in fact, that his mother has kept him locked in their house for his entire thirty years, convincing him that the air outside is poisonous. After a visit from his estranged father, circumstances force Bubby into the waiting world, a place which is just as unusual to him as he is to the world.