Yumiko, a young mother and wife living in Osaka, has her domestic life eviscerated when her husband suddenly commits suicide. She moves to a seaside village with a new husband, yet her grief haunts every corner of the film, which is shot almost entirely in wide-angle and in shadowy marine lighting. Kore-eda calls upon naturalistic flourishes to evoke grief’s ebb and flow, its great unanswerable void, and – perhaps – the potential for its healing.

An inquiry into the act of listening, Play Me Something stars John Berger as a mysterious raconteur who appears in a remote Scottish airport and tells a story to the passengers, who include a young, Scottish-accented Tilda Swinton. Berger’s euphonious voice covers all manner of topics – Venice, romance, Gramsci, testicles – as the passengers listen, argue and interject. Play Me Something describes the potency of film as pure narrative, with the mysterious and potent ability to instantaneously disrupt the mechanisms of everyday life and expand our affective horizons.

Although procès is translated as “trial” in English, “process” may be a more suitable adjective for Robert Bresson’s sobering rendition of the legendary trial of Joan of Arc. Having derided the acting in Carl Th. Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc as “horrible buffoonery”, Bresson’s approach is pointedly anti-passionate, with no soundtrack or bombastic emotional display. Freed from the conventions of the courtroom drama, Bresson allows details – the chiming of chains, the tedium of the interrogations – to convey the drama, and strange humanity, of Jeanne’s persecution.

Liv Ullmann’s psychodrama Faithless reunites the director-actor with her former husband, and greatest collaborator, Ingmar Bergman. With its spellbinding performance by Lena Endres, Faithless details the destructive impact of an affair on its three central figures, and was apparently based on a real affair between Bergman and the magazine journalist Gun Hagberg. A morally serious examination of how single decisions impact the lives of these adults and their families, the film – in both its content and context – tests the limits of forgiveness.

Tracing the lives of three generations of women linked by memory, patriarchy and the island setting of Orkney, Margaret Tait’s Blue Black Permanent was the first commercially released film directed by a Scottish woman, and the only feature film Tait would complete. Released when the director and poet was 74, the film practically invents its own diachronic, dreamlike form, in part influenced by the time Tait spent studying in Rome under the neorealists. Tait establishes her place as a pioneer in experimental British cinema, in this melodious yet unsettling hymn to female companionhood, insularity, and the great seas around us. 

Christopher Newby’s Anchoress, thick with mud and rain, follows fourteen-year-old Christine who, rather than marrying the bellicose village reeve, chooses to be walled in a tiny room to devote herself to the Virgin. Visited by villagers for counsel, Christine’s wisdom threatens the local priest, whose fundamentalism obscures his lust for power. As person and parable, the figure of Christine examines how devotion may function as a mechanism of exploding the limits of social life and political agency afforded to a woman in the 14th century.

As one of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s most elliptical films, Theorem stars Terence Stamp as the Visitor, an enigmatic stranger whose sudden arrival into – and seduction of – a bourgeois Italian household causes a spiritual and erotic crisis. Almost wordless in spite of its illustrious cast, the film foregoes none of the director’s predilections: conflicted spirituality, a Marxist critique of the family, and the interplay between philosophy and realist filmmaking. Above all, Theorem is a stark inquiry into desire: its source, its force and what happens when its object simply disappears.

With a $6 million budget (the most expensive Swedish film ever made at the time), 60 speaking parts and 1200 extras, Fanny and Alexander represents a feat of engineering that sets it apart from Bergman’s typical character-led work. Fanny and Alexander describes the childhood of two siblings in the early 20th century as their family changes around them, but it is the figures of two fathers – towering and volatile, loving and enveloping – at the centre of this film, which depicts in stylistic lushness and intimate detail the way that fathers make and unmake us.

Based on a 1932 play by Lutheran minister Kaj Munk, Carl Th. Dreyer's Ordet tells the story of the Borgen family, whose three sons are each locked in a different state of spiritual crisis. Containing some of the most meticulous mise-en-scene ever committed to film, the agnostic Dreyer achieves a cinema that transcends cinematic convention, and one whose power stems from its inhabitation of the shadowy states where faith fails.

A late-sixties echo of Oedipus Rex, the anarchic Funeral Parade of Roses stars Peter as Eddie, a transgender woman at the heart of Tokyo’s gay culture. This formally ambitious film merges documentary, cultural critique and horror tropes, perhaps because it was created during the period in which the boundaries of gender, genre and film were newly permeable and porous. This riotous celebration of individual and collective self-determination becomes a slippery and spectacular riposte to stability in all its guises.

Jamal Dehlavi’s allegorical The Blood of Hussain modernises the titular imam’s failed rebellion against a corrupt military government in postcolonial Pakistan. Wrapping production in 1977, the film was banned from national release by General Zia-ul-Haq, who took power in a military coup shortly after production was completed. Dehlavi’s equivocal politics and starkly ambitious imagery elevate a deceptively simple tale of good versus evil, depicting in full colour the horror and glory of the martyr.

Bertolt Brecht, the German poet and playwright, never completed a fully revised version of his first play, Baal, which he wrote in 1918. Director Edward Bennett rose to the challenge of producing a fresh reading of the play, going beyond a mere film adaptation. While Brecht expressed some sympathy towards Baal, Bennett took a different approach, using the play to critique the notion of the artist as a social outcast and to raise important questions about morality, sexuality, and politics. A compelling interpretation that is critically underdiscussed and incredibly difficult to find online, this film breathes new life into Brecht’s seminal work.