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

A new season celebrates Contemporary Films and its founder Charles Cooper, who bet on Britain taking to Ingmar Bergman, Yasujiro Ozu, Satyajit 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 generation with directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Andrzej Wajda and Yasujiro Ozu.

Contemporary, and its founder Charles Cooper, weren’t the only game in town – Kenneth Rive’s Gala was a fellow traveller – but Contemporary got there first, setting up shop in 1951, first with short films for the then popular film society sector, and moving into features with the 1952 Japanese film Children of Hiroshima. Its marketplace clout faded rapidly in the early 1990s, when it was a victim of changing industry practices. But amazingly, the company is still with us – and is planning a 75th anniversary series of screenings to showcase its history.