Searching the collections

Search the collections

Search across film and television information collected by the BFI since 1933 and discover the associated holdings from our collections.

Search the collections

What’s in the collections?

We hold one of the world’s largest and most significant collections of film and television material in the BFI National Archive and the BFI Reuben Library. This includes:

• 60,000 fiction films, including features, on all gauges of film and formats of videotape
• 120,000 non-fiction films, broadly tracing the history of the use of the moving image in non-fictional settings and for non-fiction purposes
• An estimated 750,000 television titles, mostly from off-air recordings as seen by the viewer, as well as production and transmission material
• Audio and video recordings of Parliamentary proceedings (Lords, Commons and Committees)
• 30,000 unpublished scripts, from first drafts to release scripts, mainly relating to British and American film and TV titles
• 30,000 pressbooks and 2000 items of cinema ephemera, such as programmes, tickets, autographed letters, promotional material and personal memorabilia
• 15,000 posters
• 600 collections of personal and company papers reflecting the history of British film and television production from the earliest days to the present
• 1 million still images from or related to films and television programmes, including publicity material, production shots and portraits
• 3000 production and costume designs
• 3000 animation cels
• 51,000 books
• 7000 journal titles, trade and academic, including many hundreds of thousands of volumes and issues
• 1 million periodical article citations
• 4 million newspaper cuttings