A charming exploration of courtship and unspoken desire in bourgeois Japan, Yasujirō Ozu’s first colour film Equinox Flower is also his return to comedy after two decades of serious dramas. Telling the tale of Hirayama, a wealthy and respected Tokyo businessman who stubbornly refuses to accept his daughter’s choice of husband, Ozu paints in miniature a country’s changing cultural tides. An intimate family story with a certain melancholy woven through even the cheeriest scenes, Equinox Flower stands alongside Ozu’s finest work. 

A male sex worker navigates his fantasies of bikers, matadors and harem leaders in this hallucinogenic classic of queer cinema. Pink Narcissus was filmed over seven years by James Bidgood, who built the film’s elaborate sets in his small Hell’s Kitchen apartment, and who released the film anonymously after a squabble with his financier. Gloriously lavish, Pink Narcissus was a revolution in DIY filmmaking and a poignant document of the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS window in gay culture.

A sensitive portrait of luminary Guyanaese artist Aubrey Williams, Mark of the Hand sees Williams returning to his birthplace of Georgetown after a decades-long sojourn in the UK. Meeting once again with the Warao Indians who heavily influenced Williams’ abstract expressionist canvases, he muses on a career spent in search of truth. The result is a lilting study on otherness, technology and the Warao concept of timehri, the titular “mark of the hand”, that stamps the masterpieces of art.

A remake of the 1935 film of the same name, An Actor’s Revenge is an extraordinary fusion of kabuki theatre and pop art. Kazuo Hasegawa, in his 300th role, is double cast as a local thief and an actor whose parents were driven to suicide by a trio of thugs, and who now seeks revenge. The idioms of kabuki theatre – melodrama, androgyny, elaborate makeup and wigs – are interrogated in Kon Ichikawa’s darkly amusing thriller, whose nagging queer subtext and unconventional Brechtian staging allow for deeper considerations of the precarity of the acting profession.

In Gallivant, director Andrew Kotting takes three generations of his family, including his 85-year-old grandmother and his disabled daughter Eden on a madcap, psychogeographic romp across Britain’s coastlines. Interweaving Super 8 documentary footage, polyphonic narration, and techniques from early cinema, the film's formal daring is balanced by its warm heart and utter lack of pretension. A road movie like no other, Gallivant is an ebullient celebration of the mundane and a fascinating enquiry into the bizarre land we call home.

A mesmerising journey through the Sahel and Sahara deserts, Werner Herzog’s Fata Morgana is the video essay as pure cinema, a floating odyssey into the sublime. In his first departure from fictional storytelling, the film establishes motifs that would go on to define Herzog’s career: lizards, blazing fires and the profoundly destructive impact of humans on their environments. With brisk narration from Lotte Eisener and a soundtrack including Leonard Cohen, the alien landscapes of Fata Morgana elucidate the fundamental strangeness of life on Earth.

Dancing mannequins, wire circus figures, a retelling of the myth of Narcissus with sentient furniture: Dreams that Money Can Buy is a Dadaist delight. An anthology film in seven parts, each directed by a different avant-garde visionary including Man Ray, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst and Alexander Calder, the film stars Jack Bittner as a literal average Joe who has gained the ability to sell dreams. A veritable who’s who of the post-war art landscape, Dreams that Money Can Buy is an exhilarating exploration into the richness of our subconscious landscapes.