‘Not just Hollywood crap’: Mike Leigh on the East End communist 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 intern