Movies

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.

The harvest of a pre-war British farm.

One of the last voyages of a commercial sailing ship on a trip from Cornwall.

In preparation for the celebration of the 1951 Festival of Britain, this short film was released to assure British citizens of their nation's place...

British film written and directed by Humphrey Jennings, filmed in documentary style showing the lives of firefighters through the Blitz in World War...

The true story of the massacre of a small Czech village by the Nazis is retold as if it happened in Wales.

Poetry by Rudyard Kipling, John Milton, and William Blake, and excerpts from speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, all read by Laurence...

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

The Eighth Army famously adopted a German song in the Western Desert. The Crown Film Unit traces the journey of Lili Marlene from its composition in...

Documentary about Humphrey Jennings, an English documentary filmmaker from the 1930s to 1950.

Short documentary on the use of the V-1 Flying Bomb during the German bombings of London.

A behind-the-scenes GPO Film Unit documentary (directed by Stuart Legg) that races from studio rehearsals and newsrooms to control rooms and...

How news of a general reduction in GPO charges was finally brought to parliament and the people, despite attempts by the country's enemies to prevent...

Humphrey Jennings’s Crown Film Unit short on the summer 1944 V-1 “doodlebug” campaign, tracking a salvo from the coast toward...

The film, made to advertise domestic telephone sets, is based around two very different families. The Petts are conventional, happy and have...

Osbert Lancaster, James Fisher, John Ormston and Ralph Vaughn Williams meditate on the history and culture of England.

A Defeated People is a 1946 British documentary short film made by the Crown Film Unit, directed by Humphrey Jennings and narrated by William...

Shot in mid-1939 as S.S. Ionian (also shown as Her Last Trip), Humphrey Jennings’s GPO short follows the Royal Mail steamer on a last peacetime...

This experiment was a “prestige advertisement” for Shell Motor Oil. As conventional animation became dominated by Walt Disney, many...

A depiction of life in wartime Britain during the Second World War. Director Humphrey Jennings visits many aspects of civilian life and of the...