BFI | Features and reviews

While the global spotlight usually falls on Brazil’s male auteurs, the country’s rich cinematic history also pulses with vital, pioneering work by women. This selection spans decades of bold female filmmaking.

This is the pass that Emeric Pressburger – later half of Powell and Pressburger – used to access the screening theatre at Germany’s biggest film studio, just before he fled Berlin in the early 1930s.

Adapted from the sleeper-hit video game The Exit 8, a walking simulator in which a Tokyo commuter roams the glitchy labyrinth of a blank subway station, Kawamura Genki’s Exit 8 shuffles in the footsteps of a long line of fugue-state modernists, from Antonioni, Kubrick and Marker to Van Sant and Bi Gan

As the nearly complete works of Ritwik Ghatak come to UK audiences for the first time, half a century after his untimely death in 1976, we plot a beginner’s path through the films of cinema’s greatest chronicler of Partition and dispossessed multitudes.

The young director’s feature-length version of his YouTube shorts stays true to its creepypasta origins, turning a wasteland of cheap furniture into an infinite hellscape that entraps the viewer along with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve.