It’s fitting that the first name on The Hospital Club's h.Club 100 film list for 2017 is that of Ken Loach. But though the director has a cinema career of more than half a century behind him – and had even officially retired before he came back to make I, Daniel Blake – his presence here is in no sense a Lifetime Achievement award. If you follow the adage, “You’re only as good as your last film”, this was Loach at his urgent best.

Victim was released in 1961. Six years would pass before the passing of the Sexual Offences Act cautiously exempted from prosecution men over 20 who had consensual sex in private. Yet the Basil Dearden suspenser probably played an equally important part in de-stigmatising homosexuality by highlighting the ugliness of homophobia.

Julie Dash’s remarkable 1991 film tells the story of the Peazant family, the descendants of freed slaves who live on the Georgia Sea Islands, an isolated community on the South-Eastern seaboard of the USA, more in touch with African traditions than other black Americans.

The three generations depicted in the film are at a crossroads: the younger Peazants are about to move to the North, leaving the elders behind in the South. Th film's dialogue is in Gullah, a vivid and poetic patois reminiscent of street Jamaican. Dash and her cinematographer, her then husband Arthur Jafa, have achieved a dreamlike visual style of great aesthetic beauty. The pace and editing of the film, which slides gently through different layers of narrative, including the voice-over of an unborn child, creates an elegiac mood, as well as evoking something of the less time-bound perspective of the traditional African mind. In this world, the souls of the ancestors are present, provide guidance and ground for the living.

This was the first widely released American film to have been directed by an African-American woman. Although she is renowned for her activism, Dash is never cliché-bound. The women in the film come across more strongly than the men: from the elder Nana (Cora Lee Day), rich in the wisdom of herbs and potions, and steeped in the spirit-based beliefs of Africa, through the passion and innocence of Eula (Alva Rogers), and on to the world-weariness of Yellow Mary (Barbara O Jones). The entire cast is totally convincing and bring to this almost magical realist tale a feeling of immediacy and veracity.

In the making of her most recent album Lemonade, Beyoncé spoke of being influenced by the film’s emphasis on the importance of African cultural roots – a tradition-focused slant much more sophisticated than the "back to Africa", Afro-hairstyle fashion of the late 1960s. The film addresses, obliquely but no less powerfully, the legacy of slavery and lynching, in the context of an extended family which wrestles, passionately and intelligently, with their spiritual heritage, a legacy of beliefs, ways of relationship and connection with the past, that provide them with great pride – not just in spite of the wounds they have suffered over centuries, but perhaps also in part thanks to them.

This BFI dual-format release of a newly restored print includes Dash's audio commentary to the film, a 72-minute interview with her from earlier this year, as well as one with cinematographer Jafa, and a Q&A with the director from the 2016 Chicago International Film Festival, moderated by playwright and actress Regina Taylor.

Such extras provide invaluable context to an extraordinary work. Dash’s film speaks of traditions that are as fundamentally American as any other, ties that connect African-Americans with their tragic history at the hands of white traders and slave-owners, as well as with their roots further back in a culture in which every form of life, from food and cooking to music and farming, expresses the life of the spirit. It has always partly been this intense spiritual quality in African-American life that has been most threatening to white culture and forms of Christianity intent on seeing the spirit as in some way superior to the senses and the sensual, and denying so vehemently the vitality of the human body and nature. It's true as well, as Beyoncé no doubt recognises, that much of the deep unease which runs through African-American culture today and that leads to violence and drug use, is in part caused by a general loss of connection to the ancestors that Daughters of the Dust so beautifully portrays.

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Overleaf: watch the 2016 trailer for the restored Daughters of the Dust

Maurice Hatton’s 1978 Long Shot comes with the subtitle “A film about filmmaking”, a nod at what has practically become a cinematic sub-category in itself. But while other directors have used the genre for philosophical or aesthetic rumination, Hatton’s subject is far more immediate and down-to-earth – the perilous business of just trying to get a movie made.

Specifically, an independent movie: Long Shot is a glorious satire on the sheer rigmarole of attempting to stitch a deal together. It’s set against the backdrop of the 1977 Edinburgh Film Festival, which gives rich extra atmosphere, and has a range of cameos from various figures in the film world who were clearly in on the joke, happily sending themselves up in sympathy with the tribulations of would-be producer Charlie and his scriptwriter Neville as they try to get their Aberdeen oil adventure drama Gulf and Western off the ground.

Alan Bennett cameos as a hilariously diffident doctor

The two are played by Charles Gormley, the Glasgow director who moved from early documentary work – he had a production company, Tree Films (“Branches Everywhere”), with Bill Forsyth in the 1970s – to make features like 1986’s Heavenly Pursuits, and actor and television writer Neville Smith. Hatton gives it all a nicely sardonic verité touch, complete with elements of voice-over narration and Shandy-esque intertitles, along the lines of “On the dangers of not looking before you leap” or “Wherein ways are explored to keep the wolf from the door”. One simply announces, “Scene missing”. By definition a micro-budget project, it was shot in grainy black and white on a combination of short ends and some East German ORWO stock that was pushing its expiry date.

Charlie has a script – though the pains of rewriting are central to the film – and some funding promised, if he can get a name director on board. So it’s off to Edinburgh, in search of Sam Fuller (the director had a long association with the Film Festival there), but Fuller is nowhere to be found. “Is he press?” one assistant in the festival offices queries. Charlie tries to interest Wim Wenders, too, who's there to present his The American Friend (Wenders is credited as “Another Director”). John Boorman becomes another later candidate.

The duo becomes an unlikely trio with the appearance, for no particular good reason but very charmingly, of actress Annie (Anne Zelda). Various picaresque dashes around the Edinburgh streets follow, one in a car commandeered from Stephen Frears (credited as “Biscuit Man"). Gallerist Richard Demarco appears somewhat grouchily as himself, Alan Bennett turns in a brilliant cameo as a hilariously diffident doctor who, on being told that writing is a lonely profession, suggests meals on wheels. Susannah York gamely plays along: hearing that the female role is underdeveloped, she coolly replies, “So you came to me?”

Long Shot is a perfect fit for the BFI’s Flipside strand, a rediscovery that is absolutely worth making – as well as a snapshot of the times, it’s also a true reflection of the enormous struggles, not to mention ingenuity, that go into getting a film idea anywhere near the screen. Gormley simply had cinema in his blood – Glasgow surely deserves a memorial to the director – and the film's final scene transports him in glorious technicolour to Hollywood, cruising the boulevards in a stretch convertible. It's a lovely ending, the stuff that dreams are made on.

This release's three extras are right on topic, too. Ross Wilson’s 1986 Hooray for Holyrood celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Edinburgh Film Festival: it’s presented by Robbie Coltrane, who doubled as a driver for the event in his stylish vintage auto (Sam Fuller did turn up, and was among his passengers). Sean Connery's Edinburgh, from 1982, is exactly what it says on the tin, lavish in its production values. Maurice Hatton’s earlier Scene Nun, Take One, a 1964 26-minuter, is a London street comedy starring Susannah York and the adventures that follow when she dresses up as a nun. There's an affectionate booklet tribute to Gormley, "Long Shot to Hollywood", by Bill Forsyth. An enchantingly off-beat package.

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Overleaf: watch the new trailer for Long Shot

F Percy Smith was a maverick film-maker whose most important work was created in a house in suburban Southgate, North London.

Memory plays funny tricks; Alan Clarke’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too is fondly remembered as a cheeky 80s sex comedy. It’s not. There’s a fair bit of sex, and the laughs do come thick and fast, but the film leaves the bitterest of aftertastes.

With some re-releases, the fascination is not only discovering the work of a director, but also the environment and context in which he or she worked.

Initially, Madame de… feels as if it might wear out its welcome. What seems a wearisome exposition on how privileged people with too much time on their hands fill their hours with vacuity gradually turns into an incisive discourse on the power of the emotions behind the facades fashioned for polite society. Towards the end, it’s clear that even the most seemingly shallow of people can be swayed by unexpected passions. And at the end: blam, an astonishingly powerful pay-off.

This is an impeccably restored presentation of the 1945 feature-length documentary that was intended to be shown in German cinemas in order to counter any remaining support for Nazism.

Letter to Brezhnev, released in 1985, was a delightful curio with sharp edges. A trans-cultural riff on Romeo and Juliet, it told of the sudden romance that erupts between a Kirkby girl and a visiting Soviet sailor one night on the tiles in Liverpool.