Movies: Basil Wright

A BAFTA award nominated documentary looking at an exhibition of Da Vinci's drawings at Burlington House in London, marking the quincentenary of his birth....

1935 documentary about the hard working life of Welsh coal miners....

The film, made to advertise domestic telephone sets, is based around two very different families. The Petts are conventional, happy and have children; the Potts are unconventional and unhappy, without children....

Weiss’s classic B&W agitprop short made after his escape to London just ahead of the Nazis. He carried with him three reels of material for his unrealized film ‘Dvacet Let Svobody’ (‘Twenty Years of Freedom’) i.e. 20 years of the existence of indepen...

Propaganda short showing how London is coping with World War II....

This documentary short examines the special train on which mail is sorted, dropped and collected on the run, and delivered in Scotland on the overnight run from Euston, London to Glasgow....

A housewife galvanises her docker husband to take an interest in more important matters than the football pools....

Early documentary, slung together from footage depicting the first invasion of North America by Europeans, designed to show industrial technology's role in the development of North America. Used footage from the 1923 feature "The Covered Wagon" as th...

The history of Scotland and the factors that have shaped the character of its people....

Experimental documentary focusing on a day in the life of city workers, featuring montage sequences and repetition to emphasise the monotony of routine office work....

The occupation of the Channel Islands....

UNESCO-funded "one world" documentary by Paul Rotha and Basil Wright....

A doctor talks about the number of injuries and deaths resulting from automobile accidents....

A narrator recounts the state of Great Britain near the end of WWII via a visual diary for the titular baby boy born in September 1944....

Rainbow Dance is a 1936 British animated film released by the GPO Film Unit. This is Lye's second film. It uses the Gasparcolor process....

Ancient Greece, contrasted with modern Greece....

Short documentary about British education in the late 1930s....

The story of a ship's arrival, unloading and departure from the Port of London in 1951, and all the life of the docklands and the river. Made for the Festival of Britain....

A portrait of John Grierson, the first Canadian Government Film Commissioner and founder of the National Film Board in 1939. Interweaving archival footage, interviews with people who knew him and footage of Grierson himself, this film is a sensitive ...

A celebration of the importance of the British countryside....