14th–19th
April 2026
across London

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Tuesday 14th April

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Close-Up

Apr 13 —
Apr 17

Open City Fellowship 2026

About: The Open City Fellowship is a daily programme of free screenings and in-depth conversations with festival filmmakers that will take place as part of Open City Documentary Festival 2026. The programme will run from Monday 13th April to Friday 17th April, between 11am – 2pm at Close-Up Cinema. Conversations will be hosted by tutors from the Documentary & Ethnographic Film MA (UCL). Successful applicants will receive Access to daily screenings and in-depth conversations wit... Read more...

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Barbican

18:30
Tue 14 Apr

Opening Night: Interstitial Cinema: the films of Artavazd Pelechian 1

The Beginning (Skizbe) Artavazd Pelechian | 1967 | Armenia (former USSR) | 10’ | digital | sound Made whilst still studying at Moscow’s VGIK, Pelechian dedicated this philosophical essay to the October revolution of 1917 and its influence on the destiny of the world in the 20th century. An early film that already contains all the elements of the work that will follow: a cinema without words, composed like music. “I am convinced that cinema can convey certain things that no language in... Read more...

Wednesday 15th April

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Close-Up

Apr 13 —
Apr 17

Open City Fellowship 2026

About: The Open City Fellowship is a daily programme of free screenings and in-depth conversations with festival filmmakers that will take place as part of Open City Documentary Festival 2026. The programme will run from Monday 13th April to Friday 17th April, between 11am – 2pm at Close-Up Cinema. Conversations will be hosted by tutors from the Documentary & Ethnographic Film MA (UCL). Successful applicants will receive Access to daily screenings and in-depth conversations wit... Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Studio)

11:00
Wed 15 Apr

Industry Round Tables

This session of networking roundtables is designed to help filmmakers and other film professionals connect with industry experts from partner organisations such as FLAMIN, T A P E Collective, the New Black Film Collective and the British Council. The Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN) was launched in 2005 as a one-stop resource to provide artists working in the moving image with access to funding, guidance and development opportunities. T A P E Collective is a ... Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Studio)

14:00
Wed 15 Apr

Archiving Amateur Film: A Discussion

Across this year’s festival programme, small-scale, historic and activist film archives come into focus: from the reactivations of the London Community Video Archive and Polish socialist-era film clubs in the Enthusiasts: Archive, to Archivistas Salvajes’ urgent preservation of Cuba’s endangered amateur cinema. Across disparate contexts, their projects foreground generosity, grassroots innovation, and collective authorship, tracing how portable technologies and independent networks have docum... Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Mix)

Apr 15 —
Apr 19

Expanded Realities Exhibition

This year’s Expanded Realities exhibition, A Sense of Space, brings together projects which explore the relationship between our senses and the environments around us using a range of media including VR, audio, installation and video games. Constantinopoliad and Peace of Mind make use of audio to untangle the ways in which the creative process is shaped by the people and events around us. Friends, lovers and family members become inspirations and collaborators, be it the poetry of Cavafy... Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Studio)

16:00
Wed 15 Apr

Miko Revereza: Nothing to Declare (Performance version, 2026)

In this performance, artist and filmmaker Miko Revereza presents a live iteration of his work-in-progress film Nothing to Declare. Drawing from a personal archive of images, accompanied by live narration and audio, the project examines strategies of smuggling through film, using the Balikbayan box – a cardboard container used by Filipinos abroad to send goods home – as a metaphor for what can, and cannot, be carried across borders. “A film is luggage. Film is what you can fit in the lugga... Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Studio)

18:00
Wed 15 Apr

Life and Labour in Socialist Poland – Non-Fiction Films from Enthusiasts: Archive

Enthusiasts: Archive emerged from a series of exhibitions in 2004 as a collaboration between Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska. The artists carried out extensive research on moving image work created by amateur film clubs in Poland during the socialist period and in 2019 brought the works together into an accessible collection, placing them within the public domain. The project has not only brought together a valuable body of under-viewed work but its archive-as-artwork model has also cha... Read more...

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Close-Up

18:15
Wed 15 Apr

Zechmeister

Angela Summereder | 1981 | Austria | 79’ | 16mm | German spoken, English subtitles Returning to a provincial crime scene, Zechmeister reconstructs the case of its (near absent) central character Maria Zechmeister, imprisoned for seventeen years in 1949 for the murder by poison of her husband in an Upper Austrian penumbra. Using re-enactments by non-professional performers and a handful of actual witnesses, fragments and rumour, in lieu of proof. The fluctuating surreality and somnambulant... Read more...

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ICA

18:15
Wed 15 Apr

Ken & Flo Jacobs: Seeing Through Film 1

A programme of Jacobs’ early collaborations with Jack Smith. Little Stabs At Happiness Ken Jacobs | 1960 | USA | 15’ | 16mm | English spoken Jacobs completed the influential Little Stabs At Happiness (1958-60) using the pseudonym K.M. Rosenthal (“to protect my obscurity”). A series of whimsical 100-foot rolls, presented as they came out of the camera, which feature impromptu performances by Jack Smith, Jerry Sims and others in the streets of New York. “Material was cut i... Read more...

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Bertha DocHouse (Renoir screen)

18:30
Wed 15 Apr

Hill Station + A Person of the Forest

Hill Station Edward Lawrenson | 2025 | UK | 29’ | digital | English spoken Hill Station takes as its point of departure an 1899 expedition by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine to research malaria prevention in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Among the expedition’s recommendations was to construct an exclusive enclave of “houses for Europeans” on a plateau above the city. This settlement – later known as Hill Station – was conceived as a spatial solution to disease, embedding health-based... Read more...

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Barbican

18:30
Wed 15 Apr

Archivistas Salvajes 1. Cuban Experimental Cinema: Games of Language, Diaries, and Urban Drifts

This programme brings together key works by two of the most singular figures of Cuban independent cinema, Manuel Marzel and Juan Carlos Alom, who emerged from the Sigma Cine Club and Cuba’s alternative production circuits. Moving between playful appropriation, film collage, documentary exploration and poetic observation of everyday life, these films engage with international experimental traditions while maintaining a distinctly local gaze. The programme offers a journey through recovered mat... Read more...

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Close-Up

20:30
Wed 15 Apr

Combined Programme: Woven

Películas Laida Lertxundi | 2025 | Spain | 6’ | 16mm | sound With Películas (Spanish for “films" or “movies"), Lertxundi continues her project of playfully deconstructing the filmmaking process, laying bare the parts that constitute a film and positing cinema as a social, collaborative, hand-made practice. Two friends sketch the horizon somewhere in the Basque country, where the sky meets the mountain and the sea. Later, in a dark room, film reels from a previous project (8 topaketa) are... Read more...

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ICA

20:30
Wed 15 Apr

Interstitial Cinema: the films of Artavazd Pelechian 2

We (Menq) Artavazd Pelechian | 1969 | Armenia (Soviet Union) | 27’ | digital | sound A vibrant tribute to the Armenian people, We is portrait of exile, reunion, collective fervour, destruction and reconstruction, that captures the tumults of Armenia’s history, the Armenian genocide in particular. It was screened at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in 1970 where it won the festival’s main award. The Inhabitants (Obitateli) Artavazd Pelechian | 1970 | Armenia (... Read more...

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Rich Mix (Cinema)

20:30
Wed 15 Apr

Dressed in Blue (Vestida de azul)

Antonio Giménez-Rico | 1983 | Spain | 98’ | Digital | Spanish spoken, English subtitles Filmed in 1981, as Spain was navigating its transition to democracy after Franco’s death, Vestida de azul follows six transgender women living in Madrid, speaking openly about their lives in a country still redefining itself. Moving between conversations held around a table and moments drawn from everyday life, questions of work, desire, family, visibility, and survival surface with humour, tension, an... Read more...

Thursday 16th April

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Close-Up

Apr 13 —
Apr 17

Open City Fellowship 2026

About: The Open City Fellowship is a daily programme of free screenings and in-depth conversations with festival filmmakers that will take place as part of Open City Documentary Festival 2026. The programme will run from Monday 13th April to Friday 17th April, between 11am – 2pm at Close-Up Cinema. Conversations will be hosted by tutors from the Documentary & Ethnographic Film MA (UCL). Successful applicants will receive Access to daily screenings and in-depth conversations wit... Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Mix)

Apr 15 —
Apr 19

Expanded Realities Exhibition

This year’s Expanded Realities exhibition, A Sense of Space, brings together projects which explore the relationship between our senses and the environments around us using a range of media including VR, audio, installation and video games. Constantinopoliad and Peace of Mind make use of audio to untangle the ways in which the creative process is shaped by the people and events around us. Friends, lovers and family members become inspirations and collaborators, be it the poetry of Cavafy... Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Studio)

11:00
Thu 16 Apr

Between Worlds: Developing and Distributing Artists’ Non-Fiction Cinema

Join BFI Doc Society and LUX for an open conversation with artist Suneil Sanzgiri about the ecosystems of support for artist’s non-fiction moving image and cinema. They will discuss the navigating of production, financing and distribution of works between the often falsely separated worlds of ‘art’ and ‘film’. This will be an extended conversation with opportunity for attendees to ask questions and participate. Hosted by Luke Moody, Head of the BFI Doc Society Fund and Ali Roche, Director... Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Studio)

14:30
Thu 16 Apr

Changing the arrangements of society: an experimental performance workshop

As part of a long-term research project, Onyeka Igwe has been revisiting the political plays of anti-colonial thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, CLR James, Una Marson and Amy Ashwood Garvey. In this interactive workshop, participants will take part in dramaturgical games, live readings and prop making in order to understand the ways in which radical theatre can be a tool for exploding reality. This event is available with the OCDF Bundle at Rich Mix: 6 events for £30. Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Studio)

17:00
Thu 16 Apr

The Essay Film in Three Dimensions: A session with Sister Sylvester

Through this artist talk and book making workshop, Sister Sylvester will explore the possibilities of working across print and essay film to create communal artistic experiences. The artist will share insights into her practice, which brings together research, cinema, live elements and audience participation. She will discuss her use of books and shared reading within projects such as The Eagle and The Tortoise, Drinking Brecht, and Constantinopoliad, as well as in the work of artists ran... Read more...

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BFI Southbank

18:00
Thu 16 Apr

Alarm Notes

Anthea Kennedy & Ian Wiblin | 2025 | UK | 123’ | digital | English spoken Kennedy and Wiblin’s radical, new artist documentary returns to locations associated with the 1933 Reichstag fire – which cemented Nazi rule – and the experiences of German Jewish pioneer birdsong recordist Ludwig Koch (1881-1974), who escaped Berlin and latterly joined the BBC. Sound (including the use of Koch’s recordings) and image assume dynamic relationships with forensic accounts of persecution and creative e... Read more...

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Close-Up

18:15
Thu 16 Apr

The Glass Booth + Return of the Bright Night + Morgenkreis

The Glass Booth Jenny Brady | 2025 | Ireland | 33’ | digital | Arabic, English & French spoken, English subtitles Working at the edge of language, Jenny Brady follows interpreters across diplomatic meetings, asylum interviews, classrooms, and conference booths, observing what happens between hearing and saying. Voices pass through bodies, hesitations accumulate, and meaning never fully settles. In The Glass Booth, interpretation appears not as neutrality, but as a fragile human nego... Read more...

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ICA

18:30
Thu 16 Apr

Ken and Flo Jacobs: Seeing Through Film 2

New York, seen through the eyes of Ken Jacobs. Orchard Street Ken Jacobs | 1955/2017 | USA | 27’ | digital | silent “My first film was about Orchard Street on the Lower East Side. This was the 50s. I needed a contained thing to film. I couldn't afford the car fare to travel around New York. And I lived right next to Orchard Street. It is a jumble of stores crushed together and a huge crowd of people walking through the streets looking for bargains. I was already very critic... Read more...

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Barbican

18:30
Thu 16 Apr

Filme Pin + An Incomplete Calendar

Filme Pin María Rojas Arias & Andrés Jurado | 2026 | Colombia, Portugal | 7’ | digital | Portuguese spoken, English subtitles One by one, front and back, a filmmaker shares the badge collection of her late grandfather, in a tactile and intimate showcase of the relics of solidarity and organising. Badges of disparate yet intersecting causes, movements and figures unearth a genealogy of radical post- and de-colonial movements, in which synapses, curiosities and unanswered questions abo... Read more...

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ICA

20:30
Thu 16 Apr

Sensual Laboratories

As a form of live multimedia performance revolving around projected light, the light show is by nature ephemeral. These one-off events are dependent on chance encounters: between inks, dyes and other substances; a mobile audience, and various modes of performance – from music, theatre or dance to the real-time projection of film loops and other still and moving-image formats. As a result, light shows are often filmed to document a transient practice as well as generate new imagery that can be... Read more...

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Close-Up

20:30
Thu 16 Apr

Clay + Lunar Visions II

Clay Kevin Jerome Everson | 2026 | USA | 63’ | digital | English spoken From within the audience, Everson’s camera observes an open meeting of city officials in West Point, Mississippi, in July 2025. Chaired by the city’s mayor, Rodick Bobo, a relative of the filmmaker’s, motions are moved, seconded and voted on. Pay rises for city employees, permits for food trucks, and other matters of municipal governance are discussed in view of the camera’s fixed frame. Against a wider backdrop of dec... Read more...

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Rich Mix

20:30
Thu 16 Apr

Combined Programme: Intersecting Memories

Ramallah, Palestine, Décembre 2018 Juliette Le Monnyer | 2025 | Belgium | 11’ | digital | sound Ramallah, Palestine, Décembre 2018 is a single-take documentation of a violent confrontation in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli soldiers, illegally stationed in the city, assert control over public spaces. They patrol cafés, enter abandoned buildings, and disrupt daily life, while local Palestinians either watch from a distance or engage in resistance. Through carefully composed, succes... Read more...

Friday 17th April

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Close-Up

Apr 13 —
Apr 17

Open City Fellowship 2026

About: The Open City Fellowship is a daily programme of free screenings and in-depth conversations with festival filmmakers that will take place as part of Open City Documentary Festival 2026. The programme will run from Monday 13th April to Friday 17th April, between 11am – 2pm at Close-Up Cinema. Conversations will be hosted by tutors from the Documentary & Ethnographic Film MA (UCL). Successful applicants will receive Access to daily screenings and in-depth conversations wit... Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Mix)

Apr 15 —
Apr 19

Expanded Realities Exhibition

This year’s Expanded Realities exhibition, A Sense of Space, brings together projects which explore the relationship between our senses and the environments around us using a range of media including VR, audio, installation and video games. Constantinopoliad and Peace of Mind make use of audio to untangle the ways in which the creative process is shaped by the people and events around us. Friends, lovers and family members become inspirations and collaborators, be it the poetry of Cavafy... Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Studio)

11:00
Fri 17 Apr

Analogue in Depth Seminar: “Why black filmmakers should shoot analogue”

Analogue in Depth takes up the question of “why black filmmakers should shoot analogue” to provoke a conversation about the uses that analogue film poses for makers and viewers in relation to black cinema. The seminar will also examine the broader field of black film in any format, as well as films by non-black filmmakers that supposedly address black life. The seminar will be divided into three sections: an illustrated talk, panel discussion, and screening. During her talk, Jennifer Laure... Read more...

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Rich Mix (Cinema)

14:00
Fri 17 Apr

Student Film Showcase: Public Anthropology

This year we celebrate the tenth round of graduate projects to emerge from our MA in Ethnographic and Documentary film. We are hugely proud of all our students, past and present, for the courage, skill and dedication they demonstrate through their studies. This year’s selection embodies the spirit of our community of aspiring filmmakers who are unafraid to express themselves and undeterred from questioning the status quo, seeking truths with compassion and curiosity. Session 1: ... Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Studio)

16:30
Fri 17 Apr

Political films/making films politically

What makes a film political? How do context, risk, relationship to nation, funding and institution shape the stories that are told and who tells them? Filmmakers and collaborators from this year’s festival programme discuss the inextricability of politics from the creation, form, lives and afterlives of film and film cultures, and what is lost in insisting in the possibility that film stays out of politics. Speakers include Basma al-Sharif, Saeed Taji Farouky and Sanaz Sohrabi. ... Read more...

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ICA

18:15
Fri 17 Apr

To the Left of the Fir Tree + The Seasons

To the Left of the Fir-Tree (Links von der Tanne) Ann Carolin Renninger & René Frölke | 2025 | Germany | 13’ | digital | German spoken, English subtitles A film that returns Willi, in his ninth decade and recently moved to a care home, to his garden and its routines in the northernmost part of Germany. Through memory he describes a path through his fruit trees – cherry, apple and plum – to where once stood a fir, as images shot some time ago of his bright home and the fur of a cat se... Read more...

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Close-Up

18:15
Fri 17 Apr

Analogue in Depth Screening

Curated by Jennifer Lauren Martin, this screening features a selection of works by black artists and filmmakers engaging with analogue film not simply as a medium, but as a deliberate aesthetic and political strategy. Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) Cauleen Smith | 1992 | US | 6’ | 16mm | English spoken Cauleen Smith employs her alter ego Kelly Gabron and a collage of images, text, and voices in order to fabricate a history in which the presence of Black women ... Read more...

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Rich Mix (Cinema)

18:15
Fri 17 Apr

Archivistas Salvajes 2. Records of the Everyday: Festivities, Rituals, and Popular Memory

The images gathered in this programme stand apart both from radical experimental impulses and from militant, pedagogical cinema intended to mobilise the masses. Instead, what emerges are modest yet persistent records: films born from an attention to the nearby, to everyday gestures, and to the celebrations of seemingly small towns shaped by larger collective histories. For more than three decades, Sorelio Hernández, known as Pucho, a trumpeter and candy seller from Bejucal, constantly film... Read more...

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Barbican

18:30
Fri 17 Apr

In Focus: Onyeka Igwe 1

No Archive Can Restore You Onyeka Igwe | 2020 | UK | 5’ | digital | English Spoken No Archive Can Restore You presents a study of the former site of the Nigerian Film Unit as it lies abandoned on Ikoyi Road in Lagos. Images of the empty, dust filled space, complete with abandoned equipment and film canisters, are re-inhabited through a sonic score that acts to imagine lost films from the archive. Colonial residues are reenacted through these sonic ghosts. The location becomes transformed ... Read more...

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Close-Up

20:30
Fri 17 Apr

Ken and Flo Jacobs: Seeing Through Film 3

A selection of Jacobs’ “Eternalisms” and other experimentations with depth and perception. Opening the 19th Century: 1896 Ken Jacobs | 1990 | USA | 9’ | 16mm | silent “Shafting the screen: the projector beam maintains its angle as it meets the screen and keeps on going, introducing volume as well as light, just as Paris, Cairo and Venice of a century ago happen to pass. Passing through the tunnel mid-film, a red flash will signal you to switch your single Pulfrich filter befo... Read more...

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Bertha DocHouse

20:30
Fri 17 Apr

National Pride: From Jericho to Gaza

Sven Augustijnen | 2025 | Belgium | 93’ | digital | Arabic & French spoken, English subtitles National Pride: From Jericho to Gaza accompanies Hassan Al Balawi, a Palestinian diplomat based in Brussels, on his return to his homeland in 2019 for the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Yasser Arafat. Sven Augustijnen’s camera follows Al Balawi closely, tracing his journey from Jericho to the Gaza border whilst bearing witness to his encounters with Palestinian dignitaries, Arafat’s fam... Read more...

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ICA

20:45
Fri 17 Apr

Last Movies

Stanley Schtinter | 2026 | UK | 76’ | digital | English spoken Last Movies traces cinema history through an unusual and speculative lens: the final films watched by cultural and political figures before their deaths. Drawing on fragments of archival material, conjecture, and cinematic memory, the film assembles a constellation of encounters between spectatorship and mortality. Built as a collage of images, notes, documents, and extracts from these last films, Last Movies drags us back into... Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Stage)

21:00
Fri 17 Apr

Festival Party

Join us on the dance floor as we celebrate community, spark connections, and mark another year of Open City Documentary Festival. Inspired by the counter-histories of rave culture, the party will feature DJ sets from Mark Leckey (NTS) and DJ Food (Ninja Tune/Telepathic Fish), alongside light projections from Insight Lighting, Heavy Flow, and Turbulent Light. Curated by Sophia-Satchell-Baeza. Tickets for this event are pay what you can. Rich Mix will take a small booking fee and the remain... Read more...

Saturday 18th April

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Rich Mix (The Mix)

Apr 15 —
Apr 19

Expanded Realities Exhibition

This year’s Expanded Realities exhibition, A Sense of Space, brings together projects which explore the relationship between our senses and the environments around us using a range of media including VR, audio, installation and video games. Constantinopoliad and Peace of Mind make use of audio to untangle the ways in which the creative process is shaped by the people and events around us. Friends, lovers and family members become inspirations and collaborators, be it the poetry of Cavafy... Read more...

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Barbican

11:00
Sat 18 Apr

Listen With Your Eyes 6: Guy Sherwin & Lynn Loo live cinema performance

Listen With Your Eyes is an ongoing series of screenings for children of all ages and their grown-up companions. It’s a space where curious minds and open hearts can come together to drift through the worlds of experimental cinema. This event features a live cinema performance by Guy Sherwin and Lynn Loo. Using multiple projectors and live interventions, they explore the magical qualities of celluloid film – light, movement, sound, and time. The programme includes a series of immersive, ... Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Studio)

11:00
Sat 18 Apr

The classroom is your set

Led by Niki Kohandel and Nia Fekri, this session will present methodologies used by moving-image artists working across schools and educational settings. We will be looking at short films produced through collaborations with young people in classrooms, as well as sharing learnings and exercises that activate alternative modes of thinking through film. This workshop is aimed at educators, teachers, artists, filmmakers, anyone with an interest in creative learning and pedagogy. Nia... Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Studio)

14:00
Sat 18 Apr

Radical Film School: Letters to a Revolutionary

Radical Film School (RFS) is a free programme for artists dedicated to film as political action. They have devised this event in solidarity with prisoners in the UK, from those incarcerated for their role in the liberation of Palestine, to those held indefinitely under the cruel regime of IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) The event will open with a film screening on prison resistance, followed by a collaborative workshop in which RFS participants will guide you through communicating w... Read more...

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Close-Up

14:30
Sat 18 Apr

Ken and Flo Jacobs: Seeing Through Film 4

More “Eternalisms” and Jacobs at his most explicitly political. Capitalism: Child Labor Ken Jacobs | 2006 | USA | 14’ | digital | sound “A stereograph celebrating factory production of thread. Many bobbins of thread coil in a great skylit factory space, the many machines manned by a handful of people. Manned? Some are children. I activate the double-photograph, composer Rick Reed suggests the machine din. Your heart bleeding for the kids? The children will surely be rescued and by ... Read more...

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ICA

15:00
Sat 18 Apr

In Focus: Onyeka Igwe 2 – Accidental Aesthetic Tradition

Curated by Onyeka Igwe, this programme reflects on the formative influence of late-night television and experimental film culture on her filmmaking language. “The thought recently crossed my mind: how did my late-night television diet of Eurotrash and experimental short films inserted into general programming produce my filmmaking language? The experience of watching films from the late 90s and 2000s and simultaneously feeling a sense of recognition and wondering if I watched them before ... Read more...

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Barbican

15:20
Sat 18 Apr

Matter of Britain

Peter Treherne | 2026 | UK | 103’ | digital | English spoken Matter of Britain is an Arthurian fantasy and ethnographic documentary rooted in the landscape and social fabric of Mayfield, East Sussex. Produced in collaboration with more than 300 local people, the film unfolds as a collective act of storytelling. It interweaves documentary observations of contemporary life with staged performance, as community members assume the roles of knights, anchorites and devils in an enactment of a Q... Read more...

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Rich Mix

16:00
Sat 18 Apr

Summoning the Silenced: The Work of Tomiyama Taeko

Free Gwangju – May 1980 – (自由光州 ―1980年5月―) Maeda Katsuhiro | 1981 | Japan | 25’ | digital | Japanese spoken, English subtitles Pop Out Balsam Seeds! – My Chikuhō, My Korea – (はじけ鳳仙花 ―わが筑豊わが朝鮮―) Tsuchimoto Noriaki | 1984 | Japan | 48’ | digital | Japanese spoken, English subtitles Chained Hands in Prayer (しばられた手の祈り) Slide set by Tomiyama Taeko, Maeda Katsuhiro, Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Koike Masato; poetry by Kim Ji-ha | 1976 | Japan | 36’ | English-langu... Read more...

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Close-Up

16:30
Sat 18 Apr

The Glass Booth + Return of the Bright Night + Morgenkreis (with descriptive subtitles)

The Glass Booth Jenny Brady | 2025 | Ireland | 33’ | digital | Arabic, English & French spoken, English subtitles Working at the edge of language, Jenny Brady follows interpreters across diplomatic meetings, asylum interviews, classrooms, and conference booths, observing what happens between hearing and saying. Voices pass through bodies, hesitations accumulate, and meaning never fully settles. In The Glass Booth, interpretation appears not as neutrality, but as a fragile human nego... Read more...

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ICA

17:30
Sat 18 Apr

In Focus: Onyeka Igwe 3

Notes on dancing with the archive Onyeka Igwe | 2023 | UK | 1’ | digital | silent In this short animation, stick figures act out the polyrhythmic dance notation developed by Nigerian playwright and choreographer Felix A. Akinsipe. We Need New Names Onyeka Igwe | 2015 | UK | 14’ | digital | English spoken “An essay video work examining contemporary Nigerian diasporic female identity through the contradictions inherent to an ethnographic reading of the funeral of the filmmaker’s... Read more...

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Barbican

18:00
Sat 18 Apr

Powwow People

Sky Hopinka | 2025 | USA | 88’ | digital | English spoken Artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka’s second feature film documents a Native American powwow, a gathering where Indigenous people celebrate their culture through dance, song, and ceremony. Made over the course of several days at Seattle’s Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center, the filmmaker invited dancers, drummers, and community members from across the powwow circuit to participate not only in the event, but also in the making of th... Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Studio)

18:30
Sat 18 Apr

TERRORRISM the TERRORISM land TERRORISM of TERRORISM common TERRORISM disgrace

In May 2025, artist filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky collaboratively devised scenarios and filmed with people arrested and tried for pro-Palestinian activism. Together they built sets and performed idealised re-enactments of their police interviews and trials, re-enactments in which they said what they weren't allowed to say in their real interviews and trials. In July 2025, the group with which some of those participants took action was banned as a terrorist organisation and an unprecedented cra... Read more...

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Close-Up

18:45
Sat 18 Apr

Combined Programme: Love is the Drug

Cairo Streets Abdellah Taïa | 2025 | France | 19’ | digital | Arabic & French spoken, English subtitles Cairo Streets is an archival travelogue composed of camcorder footage collected by filmmaker Abdellah Taïa during a trip to Cairo in 2007. Traversing the city in search of his lost love Omar, Taïa’s journey unfolds through a series of vignettes: a visit to the office of legendary filmmaker Youssef Chahine; a night shoot at the pyramids; a vibrant boat party. Drifting through smoke-... Read more...

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ICA

20:00
Sat 18 Apr

Two Refusals + An Impossible Address

Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?) Suneil Sanzgiri | 2024 | USA, India, Portugal | 35’ | digital | Konkani & English spoken Two Refusals traces interwoven histories of resistance to Portuguese colonialism across India and Africa and the solidarities that emerged through their shared struggle. The film centres on the story of a woman whose dreams are shaped by the figure of the Adamastor, a mythological storm that features in Portuguese epic poetry. First appearing i... Read more...

Sunday 19th April

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Rich Mix (The Mix)

Apr 15 —
Apr 19

Expanded Realities Exhibition

This year’s Expanded Realities exhibition, A Sense of Space, brings together projects which explore the relationship between our senses and the environments around us using a range of media including VR, audio, installation and video games. Constantinopoliad and Peace of Mind make use of audio to untangle the ways in which the creative process is shaped by the people and events around us. Friends, lovers and family members become inspirations and collaborators, be it the poetry of Cavafy... Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Studio)

11:00
Sun 19 Apr

A Roundtable on Family Cinema

A roundtable that brings together personal and collective experiences on film, family, and the idea of “family cinema.” Four practitioners working in the field of film – Maria Anastassiou, Sophia Satchell‑Baeza, Rehana Zaman and Hyun Jin Cho – will open the conversation with their own reflections before inviting a wider discussion. Together, we’ll consider our children’s earliest encounters with film, how alternative or non-commercial works can be introduced within family settings, and what k... Read more...

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Rich Mix (The Studio)

13:45
Sun 19 Apr

Making Liquid Light Shows

Join artists Julian Hand and Heena Song and writer Sophia Satchell-Baeza for a workshop exploring the art of liquid light projection. The session begins with an illustrated lecture on the history of light shows followed by instruction on the practical aspects of light projection. From choosing the right projector and rigging setups to experimenting with various materials, you’ll learn to create mesmerising visuals for live performance or cinematic special effects. Combining household products... Read more...

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Bertha DocHouse

14:00
Sun 19 Apr

Monikondee

Lonnie van Brummelen, Siebren de Haan & Tolin Erwin Alexander | 2025 | The Netherlands, Suriname | 103’ | digital | Sranantongo, Kalina, Wayana, Ndyuka, Pamaka & Aluku spoken, English subtitles The interior of Suriname is home to Maroons, descendants of Africans who freed themselves from Dutch slavery and formed a series of clans with unique languages, customs and rituals. Boogie, a Fiiman (“free man”) from such a clan, plies his motorised pirogue up and down the Maroni River and ... Read more...

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Close-Up

14:00
Sun 19 Apr

National Pride: From Jericho to Gaza (with descriptive subtitles)

Sven Augustijnen | 2025 | Belgium | 93’ | digital | Arabic & French spoken, English subtitles National Pride: From Jericho to Gaza accompanies Hassan Al Balawi, a Palestinian diplomat based in Brussels, on his return to his homeland in 2019 for the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Yasser Arafat. Sven Augustijnen’s camera follows Al Balawi closely, tracing his journey from Jericho to the Gaza border whilst bearing witness to his encounters with Palestinian dignitaries, Arafat’s fa... Read more...

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ICA

14:00
Sun 19 Apr

The Ian White Lecture: Jordan Lord

“Film festivals can be lonely places, the auditorium also prescribing isolation. My hotel room, its satellite TV, becomes both a friend and the site of private communication, between oneself and oneself, between oneself and the memory of a world. Events unravelling on the English-language news channels are conversations that I am carrying with me during the day, from the television into the auditorium in increasingly bizarre correspondence, like a growing community.” (Ian White, “Palace Calls... Read more...

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Rich Mix (Cinema)

14:00
Sun 19 Apr

Film Challenge

The London Community Video Archive presents a programme of new short films by emerging filmmakers from across the UK. Developed through an open call, this selection is made up of creative responses to the LCVA’s rich heritage. Conceived as a creative challenge rather than a competition, the initiative supported selected participants to explore the archive’s themes, methods and subject matter in original ways. The resulting works span a spectrum of approaches: from inventive re-engagements wi... Read more...

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ICA

16:30
Sun 19 Apr

Thames Film

William Raban | 1986 | UK | 66’ | digital | English spoken Thames Film examines the changing face of the River Thames over three centuries, tracing a route from Tower Bridge to the estuary, where the river meets the open sea, before returning along the same course back into the city. Raban surveys embankments, weathered wharves, and dilapidated warehouses – landscapes in which labour, empire, trade, and industrial decline are inscribed. These present-day images are interwoven with archival... Read more...

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ICA

19:00
Sun 19 Apr

Closing Night: SLET 1988 + The Case Against Space

SLET 1988 Marta Popivoda | 2025 | France, Germany, Serbia | 20’ | digital | Serbian spoken, English subtitles In an empty gymnasium in New Belgrade, a modernist suburb of the Serbian capital, dancer and anti-Milošević activist Sonja Vukićević is training. Now moving alone in the space, her movements once were at the centre of the crowd, performing a lead role in the final Yugoslav Youth Day celebration in 1988. Since that time, ideologies have shifted, nations have splintered, and wars ... Read more...

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