🎬 Friday Film Night: Top 5 Films About Historical Resistance

Date: May 16th
Category: Entertainment | Resistance on Screen | Watchlist

Sometimes the revolution doesn’t need barricades or banners — just popcorn and a projector.

This Friday, The Time Traveller’s Guild invites you to sink into your comfiest armchair and press play on some of history’s most stirring, surprising, and spine-tingling stories of resistance, rebellion, and radical courage.

From wartime sabotage to suffragette street fights, here are five of our favourite films about historical resistance movements, all based on real events — and all guaranteed to leave you a little bit more inspired (and possibly furious) than when you started.

🎞️ 1. Suffragette (2015)

Starring: Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Meryl Streep
Setting: Edwardian London
Running Time: 1hr 46min
Streaming: Amazon Prime / Apple TV

Gritty, urgent, and unsentimental, Suffragette tells the story of working-class women who joined the suffrage movement — and paid the price. This isn’t tea and tambourines; it’s hunger strikes, prison, and shattered glass.

🧵 Favourite scene: The moment the women chain themselves to railings, each link a silent scream.

🎞️ 2. The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006)

Starring: Cillian Murphy, Pádraic Delaney
Setting: Ireland, 1920s
Running Time: 2hr 7min
Streaming: BBC iPlayer / BFI Player

A raw and heart-wrenching portrayal of brothers torn apart during the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War that followed. Directed by Ken Loach, it’s less about flags and more about the impossible choices ordinary people make during political upheaval.

🍀 Bring tissues. And perhaps a shot of something Irish.

🎞️ 3. Hidden Figures (2016)

Starring: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe
Setting: NASA, 1960s
Running Time: 2hr 7min
Streaming: Disney+ / Amazon Prime

Resistance doesn’t always look like protest. Sometimes it looks like maths. This uplifting true story of Black women mathematicians at NASA during the space race reminds us that challenging systems happens in every field — even astrophysics.

🚀 Resistance in a pencil skirt, with logarithmic flair.

🎞️ 4. Army of Shadows (1969)

Starring: Lino Ventura, Simone Signoret
Setting: Occupied France, WWII
Running Time: 2hr 25min
Streaming: Criterion Channel / Curzon Home Cinema

A slow-burning masterpiece, this French film immerses you in the tension and loneliness of life inside the resistance. Less action, more atmosphere — this is what it feels like to live every day with death hovering at the doorstep.

🎩 If you liked Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, this is your cup of very French tea.

🎞️ 5. The Battle of Algiers (1966)

Starring: Non-professional actors
Setting: Algeria, 1950s
Running Time: 2hr
Streaming: MUBI / Criterion Channel

Shot in a gritty documentary style, this film depicts the Algerian struggle against French colonial rule with harrowing realism. It’s been studied by revolutionaries and military strategists alike — and remains chillingly relevant.

📽️ Watch it once. Then watch it again through the lens of current global protests.

📚 Want to Know More?

• Protest Cinema: A Global Guide – BFI Bookstore
• Filmographies of Resistance – JSTOR Daily
• The Suffragette Filmography, Women’s History Review
• The Politics of the Past in Film – Oxford Academic

💬 Tag Your Screening: #GuildFilmNight

Are you watching with friends? Hosting a discussion group? Cosplaying Violette Szabo on your sofa?
Tag @TimeTravellersGuild and use #GuildFilmNight — we’ll feature your setups and thoughts in our May 31 community post.