The most ambitious, creative and complete retrospective of works by "the most important living director you’ve never heard of" – Pere Portabella – will tour London’s most engaged cultural institutions from November 2019 until February 2020. Organised by Winstanley Schtinter at Close-Up, ICA, Whitechapel Gallery, Cafe Oto, Brixton Prison and University of Cambridge.

A year after his passing, the Lithuanian Culture Institute and Close-Up remember the great Jonas Mekas. This programme presents his first diary film, Walden, alongside the rarely screened epic As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty – both projected from 16mm prints.

To mark Holocaust Memorial Day (27 January) we present a commemorative screening of Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour opus Shoah. Using no archival footage, Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies, employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming Shoah is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait of the ways in which the past is always present.

We’re pleased to welcome American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum for a weekend of masterclasses. Day 1 concludes the Liberated Film Club's Pere Portabella retrospective with an extensive masterclass on the Catalan director’s work. On Day 2 Jonathan will present a special preview of Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa’s first feature, A House Is Not A Home: Wright or Wrong followed by a lecture on the subjects addressed in the films.