Basil Wright

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.

A tribute to the courage and resiliency of Britons during the darkest days of the London Blitz.

A Defeated People is a 1946 British documentary short film made by the Crown Film Unit, directed by Humphrey Jennings and narrated by William Hartnell. The film depicts the shattered state of Germany, both physically and as a society, in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The narration explains what is being done – and what needs to be done – both by the occupying Allied forces and the German people themselves to build a better Germany from the ruins.

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

Peter and his friends find unexpected and exciting adventures when all their wishes are granted by a magic marble.

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

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

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 independent Czechoslovakia from its 1918 founding to 1938 when the Munich Agreement dissolved it. In English with poetic narration written by C. Day-Lewis (father of Daniel Day-Lewis).

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.

Developed from John Grierson's opportunistic recruitment of the well-known director and anthropologist Robert Flaherty, Industrial Britain provides a traditional picture of Britain as is interrupted by industrial stacks billowing smoke. A dramatic illustration of how the young British documentary movement grappled with the influence of the genre’s founding father, Flaherty's ethos was essentially that of a 19th-century conservative individualist, attracted to the elemental extremes of nature and suspicious of the mechanisation of the modern world.

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

Ambitious documentary chronicling the cultural life and religious customs of the Sinhalese and the effects of advanced industrialism on such customs.

The occupation of the Channel Islands.

A celebration of the importance of the British countryside.

A short documentary to demonstrate what can be done with Technicolor film and to show various other colourful products.

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 1940 black and white film, production sponsored by the Colonial Empire Marketing Board. 'The East African colonies are introduced as representative examples of the Colonial Empire. A tribal dance hints at the "life of fear and uncertainty" replaced by British rule, a village's "squalor" the need for continued war on "ignorance, poverty and disease." "Much can be achieved by money and the initiative of the White Man:" film hints at hydro-electric schemes, modern harbours (Mombasa), roads, bridges etc and illustrates in more detail hospital expansion; tsetse fly research and control; relieving malnutrition; agricultural improvement; education (primary school; Makerere College)." - Abridged version of synopsis on colonialfilm.org

Short documentary about British education in the late 1930s.