"It is up to us, as African filmmakers who have a place to carve out for ourselves, to make films politically better than anyone else." Sidney Sokhona, Cahiers du Cinéma, 1978

Sidney Sokhona was a young Mauritanian living in Paris when he embarked on a film project to document a rent strike at the hostel where he and 300 other immigrants were housed in squalid conditions.

Filmmaker, artist, activist Derek Jarman is, along with Peter Greenaway, one of the most iconoclastic figures of the 1980s.

Following an apprenticeship on Ken Russell’s The Devils, Jarman’s filmmaking started in the late 1970s with Sebastiane, a passionate celebration of homoeroticism and Jubilee, described as “Britain’s only decent Punk film”.

One of the key impacts of the arrival of Channel 4 on the filmmaking landscape of the 1980s was the surfacing of new regional voices; none more so authentic and uncompromising than young Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar. Her plays, which depicted her experience of working-class life in the notorious Buttershaw estate in Bradford, had been staged at the Royal Court.

A struggling London novelist and his wife inherit a cinema in a long-lost relative's will. Upon arriving in provincial 'Sloughborough', they imagine this means the town's regal Grand cinema. In fact, they've accrued local, debt-ridden, rat-ridden flea pit The Bijou - its marquee letters vibrating to passing trains - and it's three squabbling staff.

Naturally, the plucky out-of-towners opt to renovate, with the help of eccentric scene-stealers Peter Sellers and Margaret Rutherford.