Mike Leigh Praises Distributor Who Brought World Cinema to the UK

‘Not just Hollywood crap’: Mike Leigh on the distributor who brought world cinema to the UK

A new season at the BFI celebrates Contemporary Films and its founder Charles Cooper, who bet on Britain taking to Ingmar Bergman, Yasujiro Ozu, Stayajjit Ray – and a young Mike Leigh Occasionally, vital pieces of the cultural jigsaw disappear without anyone really noticing. This, sadly, was the fate of Contemporary Films, the British film distributor that popularised sophisticated, grownup international cinema – foreign language mostly – in the UK, and heralded the arrival of the auteur gene...

By Andrew Pulver