Film & TV

An auto-tuned hip-hop extravaganza starring Alastair Campbell, Charlotte Church, Hugh Grant, Rupert Murdoch, Kelvin MacKenzie and many more

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From Iran's atomic research facility to a whaler off the Falkland Islands, the state visits of the 50s and 60s took the Queen and her family to some of the world's most extraordinary places. And wherever the royals went, the official camera teams were on duty. Now those film reels have been uncovered. Christopher Stevens reports

Forgotten footage of royal tours abroad in the 1950s and 60s reveals the sheer glamour of the Queen's travelling wardrobe, in an era when she rivalled film stars such as Elizabeth Taylor as the world's most photographed woman.

Films made by the Central Office of Information (COI) for screening in cinemas overseas show the young monarch in sables and furs and bare-armed in dramatic satin dresses with elbow-length silk gloves or long, gauzy jackets.

More than four hours of film, released this week by the British Film Institute (BFI), overturns the perception of the Queen's fashion sense as staidly sensible. Instead, a taste for bold and sometimes breathtaking colours is revealed, from flamingo pink to electric blue – a Hollywood wardrobe to match the style of more sensational post-war royals such as Princess Grace of Monaco or Queen Farah of Iran.

Equally striking to modern viewers is the apparent absence of any security precautions, in the years before the assassination of John F Kennedy. In Pakistan, barely a decade after the turbulent transition to independence from empire, the Queen stands and waves from an open-top car as crowds throng around her just metres away.

The footage also records Prince Philip's astonishing, early voyage aboard the royal yacht Britannia to the Antarctic and the south Atlantic, as well as following a young Princess Margaret on a tour of Kenya at the time of the Mau Mau uprising.

"I just find them fascinating, to compare the world then to what it is today," said series editor Tony Dykes. "During the 1961 state visit to Iran, for instance, Prince Philip pays a visit to an atomic facility, the Institute of Nuclear Science at Tehran University."

The COI, which took over from the Ministry of Information after the second world war as the government's official arm of communication, closed in March. Its archive of 20,000 film reels, yet to be fully catalogued, is now maintained by the BFI. The Queen On Tour, released on DVD on 28 May, is the seventh volume of rare footage from the COI vaults, and the first to focus on the royal family.

"The royals were always quite a strong strand of film-making among other COI output," Dykes said. "With the jubilee, this was the perfect time to take a look. What's of interest are the tours and state visits, and there's lots of them – I started by watching about 12 to 15 hours of material, and then whittled it down from there. My selection was driven by technical considerations, picking the best 35mm negatives. Some of it had to be rejected because we only had a 16mm print that was quite badly damaged.

"I also wanted entertaining films. The great thing about them is that they are beautifully filmed, lovely travelogues and wonderful anthropological studies. You see lots of traditions, lots of cultures which have changed so much over the years. They might have been shown in cinemas domestically as well, but certainly not on British TV: they were made for overseas consumption, promoting Britain as a PR exercise.

"Much of it was shot in Technicolor, by Pathé and Movietone cameras, in those beautiful, warm colours that they were known for – compilations of newsreels, to which the COI added specially scripted narration."

The voiceover for the Iranian visit is careful to give the Shah his full imperial title, the Shahanshah or king of kings. It is his wife, the 23-year-old queen consort Farah, who steals the film, however, trailing white furs over a diamond-encrusted dress at an embassy party hosted by the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, where traditional British dishes had been flown out from London kitchens.

That tour also took in India, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and Pakistan, where the Queen was invited to inspect the plans for an almost empty landscape that would become the new capital city, Islamabad. She also watched displays of horsemanship, with tribesmen demonstrating the cavalry sport of tent-pegging, skewering wooden sticks with a lance at full gallop.

In a week-long visit to Sierra Leone later that year, the royal couple toured the diamond diggings at Hangha, toured Freetown and saw the Guma Dam, in a country which had declared independence just eight months earlier. The influence of empire is still heavy – at a "children's rally" for example, the boys had boaters and blazers, while the girls wore gymslips.

"There's a lot of local life and colour," Dykes said, "but this was a country that had only just ceased to be a British colony. If there was any opposition to the royals, you didn't see it – that must have ended up on the cutting room floor."

When the Japanese emperor Hirohito came to London in 1971, the controversy was even more intense. During the drive by state carriage from Admiralty Arch to Buckingham Palace, veterans lined the route and turned their backs on the emperor in silent protest at the treatment of war prisoners. "The political backdrop is fascinating," Dykes said, "but none of that was evident in the film at all. This was very much the official view."

The civil unrest in Kenya during Princess Margaret's 1956 visit received a fleeting acknowledgement, with a reference to the arrest of Dedan Kimathi, a "leading terrorist". Kimathi, the head of the Mau Mau army, was executed weeks later; 30 years on, Nelson Mandela was to cite him as an inspiration.

The political struggle is invisible in the COI's footage, filmed in black and white, as the young princess meets colonial governors in Kenya and Tanganyika, visits botanical gardens, and sails on Britannia to Mauritius. From there she travelled to the island of Zanzibar, then a British protectorate. The film has a flavour of the Arabian nights, with the princess welcomed to a white palace beside the sea by the sultan, while his soldiers dance in the streets below and wave their swords.

The most extraordinary footage, though, features the Duke of Edinburgh in the Falklands, first boarding a whaler by a basket on a rope and pulley, and later touring a factory ship where he watches the flensing of a whale carcass. As immense strips of blubber are cut away, Prince Philip earnestly questions his guides; the narrator comments that the duke stowed away information for a future lecture tour, including the fact that the whale's tongue weighed three tonnes.

On the Antarctic ice, he visits scientific stations, walks with penguins and drives a dog sled. As the voyage continues through the winter of 1956-57, the duke's beard becomes more noticeable, until the family resemblance to Tsar Nicholas is unmistakable. Looking more like a Romanov than a Windsor, he visits the house where Napoleon was held on St Helena, and inspects gardens where trenches were dug so that the deposed emperor could walk without being constantly observed by his guards.

"They are just lovely films, really well produced and edited," Dykes enthused. "And there's so much scope for future releases, with so many COI films about science, health and British working life."

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John Hillcoat's moonshine drama looks handsome but its cocktail of violence and sentimentality sticks in the throat

John Hillcoat's Lawless is far closer in spirit to his Outback Western, The Proposition, than his more recent, harrowing film, The Road. Lawless is based on the avowedly true story of the Bonduras brothers in Franklin Country, Virginia, running illicit liquor throughout the prohibition era from their own stills way up in the hills, and fighting battles with corrupt cops and feds, all greedy for a slice of the hooch profits.

Lawless is a handsome-looking film, with a reasonably winning lead performance from Shia LaBeouf. But it's basically a smug, empty exercise in macho-sentimental violence in which we are apparently expected to root for the lovable good ol' boys, as they mumble, shoot, punch and stab. Our heroes manage to ensnare the affections of preposterously exquisite young women, and the final flurry of self-adoring nostalgia is borderline-nauseating.

Tom Hardy plays Forrest Bondurant, a great impassive lunk of a man: tough, grizzled, though with Hardy's weirdly sensuous lips. He is feared and respected for the unhesitating brutality with which he protects his bootlegging business. Jason Clarke plays Howard Bondurant, his more obviously crazy hillbilly brother, given to getting high on his own supply, and to alerting Forrest to cop raids by flinging back his head and howling like a dog. And lastly, there is nervous, quick-witted young Jack Bondurant, nicely played by LaBeouf, touchy about the fact that he is not as tough as his siblings, and eager to prove himself. The brothers run a kind of roadhouse-cum-gas-station very like the kind of establishment you see at the beginning of scary movies — and entertainingly portrayed in Joss Whedon's The Cabin In The Woods.

It is pantywaist Jack who sees how their business could be opened up by selling to the big-hitting mobster Floyd Banner (Gary Oldman), and their new riches inflame the crooked federal agent Charlie Rakes, played by Guy Pearce — a ridiculous pantomime baddie who dyes his hair and wears swish cologne. Meanwhile, Forrest and Jack manage to attract the admiration of two women played by Jessica Chastian and Mia Wasikowska, who shimmer adorably onto the screen turned out as if for a Vogue fashion shoot.

Hillcoats puts it all together capably enough, but the supposed heroism and stoicism of alpha-bro Forrest, as he refuses point-blank to pay off the corrupt feds, is pretty ridiculous and suspect. As with all movies "based on a true story", you wonder what the true story actually is. The final credits disclose that all this was known as the "Franklin County Conspiracy". We are asked to believe that the Bonduras brothers did not need to conspire to survive. I wonder.

The violence is gruesome, and perpetual, with a particularly horrible tar-and-feather scene — and yet nothing somehow seems to be at stake for anyone, and the brutality seems to be there simply to underline how tough and real it all is. Tom Hardy deploys his stolid screen presence, and Gary Oldman has an interesting, but all too brief cameo appearance as the gangster of whom everyone is in awe. But the whole thing adds up to nothing at all, and leaves nothing behind but a nasty moonshine hangover.

Rating: 2/5

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All the latest news, reviews, comment and buzz from the Croisette

10.44am: A little scene setting. Twenty meters away, the photographers are baying for Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska and Gary Oldman to give em a smile. I can see this because it's being streamed into the press room on a big screen, which I can half see if I peer over the huge tangerine vase in my line of vision (the press room's wifi is sponsored by Orange). In a minute they'll troop past where I'm sat and into the press conference room, where they'll be quizzed about the movie we've all just seen: Lawless. It's a prohibition era crime thriller directed by John Hillcoat and adapted by Nick Cave from the novel The Wettest Country in the World. You might remember that a few years ago those two teamed up to make The Proposition, and there's a lot of crossover: grimy period togs, sweaty brothers duffing people up, Guy Pearce gobbing on the floor. Personally I preferred this one: it's got a sense of humour, it's not quite so eager to be a landmark of rural macho moody cinema. In fact, that sense of humour sometimes means it totters towards panto. In some scenes it's a bit of a ham-off between Pearce, as a dandified law enforcement officer with the most horrible hairdo ever, and Hardy as the lumbering, taciturn elder brother in a family of tough love moonshine makers.

10.41am: Bonjour and welcome to day four of the Cannes 2012 liveblog. It's a little different today, and by different I mean worse. Rather than Andrew Pulver in London with his snazzy, highly-informed, all-singing all-dancing liveblog, you'll have me, sat on a shelf in the press room at the Palais, with intermittent updates, no embedded pictures or tweets and a whole heap of typos. Sorry about that.

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The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director explains why his new drama - about a gang of Bronx school kids travelling home at the start of their summer vacation - pushes against the idea of a pack mentality

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Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted, Reality, Once Upon A Time and Laurence Anyways receive their premieres

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Bob Carlos Clarke was a famous fashion photographer who killed himself six years ago leaving behind his wife Lindsey and their daughter Scarlett, now 20. But, they tell Britt Collins, they have been determined not to let it 'take them to hell'

Sometimes Lindsey Carlos Clarke was so angry with her late husband that she wanted to burn all his work, change her name and disappear. Instead, she opened a gallery and is consumed by keeping the legacy of his "dark genius" burning. "Bob was the most exciting man I ever met. He was wild, dangerous, sexy and out of control," she says, sitting in her immaculate white living room, with its one violet-painted wall, a perfect backdrop for his striking black-and-white photographs. "When we were young in the 70s, before Bob was famous, we made a romantic pact that we'd kill ourselves when we looked too old in the mirror."

Lindsey was never serious, but on 25 March 2006, her husband of 30 years, the celebrated fashion and glamour photographer Bob Carlos Clarke, walked a mile to Barnes station in south-west London and jumped in front of a train. Aged 55, he left behind Lindsey and their teenage daughter, Scarlett. Three weeks earlier, he had checked into the Priory rehab centre – not for the usual celebrity reasons of drugs, drink or exhaustion, but severe clinical depression.

A prolific but troubled provocateur, the Irish-born Bob Carlos Clarke was known for his pictures of rock stars and erotic, sometimes shocking, images of glamorous women. Often referred to as the British Helmut Newton, he shot Dita von Teese in a corset and stilettos, holding knives; Rachel Weisz in an oil-slick rubber catsuit; a naked and pregnant Yasmin Le Bon. But the most extraordinary images were for Marco Pierre White's White Heat, looking like a rock star in his white-hot kitchens.

"Sometimes I can't come to terms with the fact that he's not coming back," says Lindsey, who is in her late 50s. "One of the things that happens to grieving people is they secretly think they're crazy. I have moments when I don't feel sane. I had a terrible desire to set fire to his whole archive and I think: Oh God, is this ever going to go away? The violence of his death was hard to deal with. When the police appeared that afternoon, I knew it was over. Scarlett rushed to the door and burst into tears before anything was even said. I couldn't allow myself to fall apart because I didn't want her to feel she'd lost both parents." 

She stops and looks away, her eyes misting. "It was terrible for Scarlett. That night, she got into bed with me and started rifling through pictures of Bob and me, and asking incredibly searching questions. I told her, 'You can make a decision, you can either let this terrible thing take you to hell or you can let it empower you.'"

For Scarlett, now 20, the pain of losing her father is still raw and she is struggling to make sense of it. "I don't think you ever get over something like that," she says. "I never had anyone close to me die so I hadn't ever had to deal with that sort of grief. There are times when I feel really low, but it comes and goes. It's not something you can control. I'm dealing with it every day and probably will for ever."

She misses him terribly, but never felt abandoned or betrayed as people often do after a loved one kills themself. "I'm just pissed off that I didn't get to hang out with him as an adult," she says without a hint of anger or bitterness. "We would have had a lot of fun. I grew up with someone who would spend a week setting up a prank just for his own amusement and [who] could also be very cruel, so black humour is a big thing in our family. My last memories of Dad are from going to see him on a Sunday night in the Priory and having dinner together."

She knew her father was a wildly unconventional character but was unaware how fragile and unstable he was.

Her mother – who tried to protect Scarlett – had been quietly enduring his erratic behaviour. "It was a long time before I realised Bob wasn't right," Lindsey admits. "When you're used to dealing with someone who's dysfunctional you become dysfunctional yourself. Months before his death, he had successful shows in London and Madrid, but seemed uninterested, distracted and joyless.

"By September 2005, he had begun to behave oddly. He moved into our basement flat and every morning I'd go down and find the front door open. He would go missing and I'd find him in his van, just sitting. I'd say, 'Hello, darling.' And he'd say, 'I don't know what I'm doing.' He became fearful of everything. The doctors said he was psychotic, but who knows?

"The death of our friend [the photographer] Patrick Lichfield was a further blow. He was crushed and said he envied Patrick. When I went to Patrick's memorial in November 2005, Bob was already in the Priory."

Bob and Lindsey met in London in the summer of 1976, when she was working as a model, and she was drawn to his dark humour and playfulness. "The first shoot we did was the pictures on a motorbike for his book Obsession and we became friends."

They were both married and started a heated and obsessive two-year affair before eventually leaving their partners. For a while during the 1980s, they were a golden couple, with a starry circle of friends, from Marco Pierre White to Keith Richards. Flitting around the world for shoots and shows, there were exotic holidays in Mustique, parties with the Rolling Stones.

"Bob was very entertaining, moody and cruel," she says, describing his constant obsessions with models, infidelities and disappearances. All the while Lindsey looked after Bob's business and their daughter. As she said in an interview three years ago: "I told him, 'You can have your girls in your studio but don't ever bring them back here.' The beach house was supposed to be pure as well, but that didn't last long. He said to me, 'I don't enjoy sex unless it's secret.' 

"I felt depressed and asked him to see a therapist and he said, 'But I like being a shit.' I thought about leaving him, but ultimately I had taken it upon myself to be with somebody who was complicated."

As Bob's career took off, and with a baby, Lindsey hoped her husband would be happier. In 1997, five years after Scarlett was born, the couple were married. "I know Bob loved me, but he had a difficult time giving back because he was so damaged and never came to terms with the big, dark mess of his childhood. He couldn't be there for me because he could hardly be there for himself."

Sometime in the late 90s, her husband grew disillusioned with everything. "Nothing was ever good enough for Bob," says Lindsey. "He wanted to be a legend, but he became depressed about his work [partly because people had begun to use digital photography], with himself. He worried about growing old, losing his looks and not being the in-fashion thing. I'd say, 'Don't be silly, we have a beautiful house, another by the sea, a lovely daughter, a studio, money in the bank.'

"I always thought that people who talked about suicide never did it," she says. "We were on holiday in France with [the fashion editor and stylist] Isabella Blow eight years ago. Scarlett adored Isabella and was riveted by her because she brought these boxes of hats. I said to Scarlett one morning, 'Let's take Isabella a cup of tea.'

"We knocked on the door and Isabella said, 'I think I'm going to kill myself.' I just said, 'Let me know either way because I'm setting the table for lunch.' You get exhausted with people."

Toughest, Lindsey says, is letting go of the guilt. "With any suicide, you feel like it's your fault and could have stopped it. Looking back, I feel sad about how vulnerable Bob was."

Scarlett scarcely remembers much about the Saturday afternoon when the police turned up on their doorstop. She was expecting to visit her father that weekend. "I thought he'd been in an accident but I only had to see Mum's face to realise he was dead. I don't even think I cried. I was in shock. Now, when I think back, I feel sad but at the time I didn't know how to react."

Lindsey says their shared sense of black humour kept them afloat. In some ways, she says, she feels detached, as though these events happened to someone else. "I can relive everything in strange little pieces: the police arriving, the fingerprints, the funeral. It has taken me five years to do the headstone."

Lindsey's terraced house – light, airy and full of glittering objects – is virtually a shrine to Bob, his photographs on the walls and stacks of his books on every surface. "It's been hard letting go – I still haven't."

Lindsey may not have moved on but she is much happier now – last summer she and the professional golfer Andrew Raitt were married.

She shows me a stark black-and-white photograph Scarlett took of her father, when she was only 13, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. "She's multi-talented and has a natural ability to take pictures," says Lindsey.

Scarlett, it seems, has inherited the best of her father.

• Bob Carlos Clarke: One-Offs, a retrospective exhibition, is at the Little Black Gallery, 13a Park Walk, London SW10, from 28 May to 30 June thelittleblackgallery.com

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The Dictator (15)
(Larry Charles, 2012, US) Sacha Baron Cohen, Anna Faris, Jason Mantzoukas, Ben Kingsley, John C Reilly. 83 mins

Having run out of unsuspecting Americans to prank, Sacha Baron Cohen takes the conventional fish-out-of-water route this time, as his Arab tyrant comes to terms with western democracy. But if the story plays it safe, the comedy treads a risky line between lampooning Islamophobia and fuelling it. The high gag rate, animated performance and general broad-spectrum offensiveness help him get away with murder, and worse.

The Raid (18)
(Gareth Evans, 2011, Indon/US) Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, Yayan Ruhian. 101 mins

Throwing more punches than every other movie this year combined, this single-minded Indonesian martial arts epic doesn't let up until everyone in its baddy-infested apartment block, and the auditorium, is pummelled into submission. Pacifists, look away now.

2 Days In New York (15)
(Julie Delpy, 2011, Ger/Fra/Bel) Julie Delpy, Chris Rock, Albert Delpy. 96 mins

Welcome return for Delpy's chaotic, neurotic alter ego and her unpredictable family, who turn up en masse to stay with her and new partner Rock – a recipe for cross-cultural disaster, but in comedy terms, this is haute cuisine.

If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle (15)
(Florin Serban, 2010, Rom/Swe/Ger) George Pistereanu, Ada Condeescu, Mihai Constantin. 94 mins

A young offender's options for the future start to disappear even as he approaches freedom in this tense, intelligent Romanian realist drama. Family pressures from the outside add to the institutional pressure on the inside, until something has to give …

Even The Rain (15)
(Icíar Bollaín, 2010, Spa/Mex/Fra) Gael García Bernal, Luis Tosar, Juan Carlos Aduviri. 103 mins

Historical film-making inevitably collides with reality as a Spanish film crew come to Bolivia to make a Christopher Columbus epic on the cheap, just as their extras rise up against imperialist water privatisation. Based on real events, it's a little worthy but retains its integrity.

She Monkeys (12A)
(Lisa Aschan, 2011, Swe) Mathilda Paradeiser, Linda Molin, Isabella Lindquist. 83 mins

Sexual confusion and peer-group rivalry come into play in this sympathetic study of teenage female relationships, centred on a new arrival at an equestrian acrobatics school.

The Source (15)
(Radu Mihaileanu, 2011, Bel/Ita/Fra) Leïla Bekhti, Hafsia Herzi, Hiam Abbass. 125 mins

Arab women shake up power relations in their village (in an unspecified location), by withholding sex until their lazy menfolk sort out the water supply, resulting in a comical cultural satire that's too generous to really stick it to the Arab man.

The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (U)
(Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1943, UK) Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr, Anton Walbrook. 163 mins

Reissue for the wartime classic, exploring the soul of old England with political and formal courage.

Out from Friday

Iron Sky

Moon Nazis strike back in this low-budget sci-fi.

Showing Wed only

Moonrise Kingdom

Young hearts run free in Wes Anderson's latest.

Men In Black 3

Will Smith takes the alien comedy back to the 1960s.

Barbaric Genius

Doc on an ex-con turned chess master.

Free Men

Tahar Rahim plays an Algerian in wartime France.

What To Expect When You're Expecting

Parenthood comedy with Cameron Diaz, J-Lo and Chris Rock.

Personal Best

Doc following British sprinters.

Tales Of The Night

Silhouette animation from Michel Ocelot.

Coming soon

In two weeks … Ridley Scott's anticipated sci-fi Prometheus … Whisky galore in Ken Loach's The Angels' Share …

In three weeks ... Plan B takes on broken Britain in Ill Manors … Simon Pegg in Brit-com A Fantastic Fear Of Everything …

In a month … Tom Cruise leads hair-metal musical Rock Of Ages … Robert Pattinson leads David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis …

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Haywire

You can usually tell when someone who fights for a living is put into a movie, as the names in the credits are beefed up with prefixes like "Stone Cold". For mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano's latest big-screen appearance there are no such signifiers, but then this isn't a typical example of the sub-genre. For one thing, it's actually a decent movie.

Steven Soderbergh continues on his career-long quest to be the director with the most varied CV (his other 2011 offering was the serious and downbeat Contagion). In crafting a film around the considerable talents of non-actor Carano, Soderbergh has delivered a stark, sleek and stripped-down action movie.

Carano play a private firm black ops agent who's hung out to dry by her contractors, and forced to fight her way to the truth in order to clear her name. It's a role that purposely doesn't put many demands on her acting skills (although she's perfectly fine in it), and Soderbergh has Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Michael Fassbender and others to take up the thesping slack.

We know her motivation, all emoting is ditched, and Carano's left to display the punching and kicking abilities she was hired for. For the numerous fight scenes, Soderbergh holds off on the editing and just lets her do her thing. Even the soundtrack drops away, all the better to hear every bone-shattering blow. Like The Raid, this is an action movie with all the rubbish bits cut out.

Blu-ray & DVD, Momentum

True Blood: The Fourth Season

After vampires and shape shifters, now fairies are added to the fun supernatural mix.

Blu-ray & DVD, Warners/HBO

The Grey

Liam Neeson is pitted against deadly wolves in the wilderness.

Blu-ray & DVD, EIV

Ghost In The Shell – Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society

Movie-length offering from the excellent animated TV series – grown-up sci-fi.

Blu-ray & DVD, Manga

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things & Dead Of Night

Cracking double bill of highly inventive early 1970s zombie flicks from prolific director Bob "A Christmas Story" Clark.

DVD, Nucleus

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iD Fest, Derby

"Exploring identity through cinema" is about as broad a remit as you can get away with, but any event featuring Brian Blessed, Mike Hodges and Paddy Considine is always welcome. They'll be talking about their careers and looking back on old favourites. There are new films, including a Kent fruit-picking mystery (Strawberry Fields) and a Korean supernatural thriller (Haunters). But the main draw is an eclectic mix of films such as OSS 117: Cairo Nest Of Spies, Rupert Everett zombie movie Dellamorte Dellamore and Bogart noir classic In A Lonely Place.

QUAD, Thu to 27 May

Bauhaus Film Season, London

They did everything from pottery to architecture, so it was inevitable the Bauhaus would stray into film-making somewhere along the way. Complementing the Barbican's current exhibition on the German design movement (to 12 Aug), this season brings together Bauhaus-related documentaries and rare abstract, animated and projected experiments by Bauhaus students, mostly accompanied by talks and live music. Towering over the Bauhaus film legacy is versatile Hungarian artist/teacher László Moholy-Nagy, whose own short films are augmented by a recreation of the 1929 film festival he curated with Hans Richter (with films by Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger, among others), a documentary on his eventful life, and an appearance from his daughter, Hattula.

Barbican Screen, EC2, Fri to 31 May

Showcomotion, Sheffield

There's much here you won't find at grown-up festivals, including homemade sweets, fancy-dress events and workshops on comedy, puppetry and astronomy. The films, too, stray from the predictable, showing what's out there for young audiences beyond the multiplex behemoths – though there are a few of those too (forthcoming Dr Seuss animation The Lorax, for example). In Canada's The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mum, an adopted girl imagines her own parentage; in Belgian fable On The Sly, another little girl runs off to the forest; while Maori Boy Genius follows New Zealand's future Obama (possibly). Closer to home, the team behind poppy CBBC comedy Sadie J share their secrets, and there's a preview of Sky's new Sinbad.

Showroom, Fri to 3 Jun

Cine-Excess, London

Mining the golden years when too much was never enough, Cine-Excess debates issues of censorship and exploitation, reappraises maligned reputations and gives you movies like they don't, won't and can't make any more. Two titans of 1970s Italian cinema are in attendance: Enzo G Castellari and Sergio Martino. The former is best known for Tarantino-influencing The Inglorious Bastards and spaghetti westerns such as Keoma; the latter for florid, satanic giallo movies such as the brilliantly titled Your Vice Is A Locked Door And Only I Have The Key. Also look out for Jack Cardiff's freak horror The Mutations and Aussie shocker Fair Game.

Odeon Covent Garden, WC2 & Italian Cultural Institute, SW1, Thu to 26 May

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