Online Study Tool Kit

Spotlight on: BFI Player for Higher Education

Roehampton University Library has recently taken out a subscription to the British Film Institute's streaming service for higher education. You can access it via this link with your Roehampton login details: library.roehampton.ac.uk/bfiplayer -  but the first time you visit you will need to set up a personal account. From then on, you use your personal account to access the service. In this post, we shine the Library spotlight on this new resource, and some of the other, freely available resources provided by the BFI.

The British Film Institute (https://www.bfi.org.uk/) is the UK's leading film education and research organisation, with its stunning cinema, Reuben library and "mediatheque" located at London's South bank near Waterloo station, a short journey from Roehampton (take the train from Barnes). Their online streaming services include the free BFI Player archive of short feature films and documentaries showing a range of British working and domestic lives over the last 120 years. The full BFI Player streaming service is available to paying subscribers, but Roehampton staff and students have free access to the specially curated Higher Education service via the Library's new subscription. 

Once you have logged in and created your account, you can view a wealth of British and international film content expertly curated for university use, regardless of whether or not film is your major topic of study or research. There are over 450 films in various genres including comedy, drama, crime and thrillers, horror, romance, fantasy and animation. The Featured Collections cover topics such as LGBTQI+  (BFI Flare, Queer Crime), female directors (Woman with a Movie Camera), Black Cinema and London on film - not to mention every Librarian's favourite, Based on the Book.

You also get the exclusive, personally presented selections of top film critic Mark Kermode, with the Mark Kermode Introduces...collection. You can search for films you want to watch, or browse the featured collections or list of genres, which also act as filters for you to refine your search. 

Non-fiction films represent about 10% of the content, with documentaries on a wide range of subjects, from music and culture (such as recent studies of music movements including Lover's Rock and Two-Tone, or a 2022 feature on writer Patricia Highsmith)  to history (such as Claude Lanzmann's 1985 holocaust chronicles, Shoah) and sport (Werner Herzog's study of skiing champion Woodcarver Steiner). The performing arts also feature, with choreographer Akram Khan's new work, Creature, and documentaries on the Bolshoi Ballet and modern Morris dancing. There are even some vintage British public information films for you to enjoy. 

BFI Player for HE is licensed for educational use, which means that as a member of Roehampton University you can watch the films on your personal device or on a university computer, and staff can show content to students in class for teaching purposes. However, please note that it is not licensed for public screenings so we are unable to allow open film showings of BFI Player content, and films cannot be downloaded or copied in any other format. But feel free to log in and explore the content of BFI Player for HE within these parameters - there is something there for everyone!

Other film and TV streaming services available to you at Roehampton include Kanopy, and Roehampton Online Broadcasts (ROB). For information on many more recommended film resources, both free and subscribed, see the Watch section of our Film and Film Production subject guide.