Team
Abiba Coulibaly – Guest Services Coordinator
Bethany Privitera – UCL Student Showcase Programmer
Christopher Pettit-Mee – Expanded Realities Programme Advisor
Ellis Lee – Technician
Elizabeth Dexter – Talks & Workshops Coordinator
Emily Mason – Guest Services Coordinator
Harry Løvstrøm – Expanded Realities Technical Producer
Huda Awan – Editor (Open City Texts)
Juliana Silva – Expanded Realities Exhibition Assistant
Laurence Avis – UCL Student Showcase Programmer
Laverne Caprice – Marketing Manager
Lucy Wardley – Festival Producer / Expanded Realities Programmer
María Palacios Cruz – Festival Director
Marta Calderón – Production Manager / Volunteer Coordinator
Oliver Wright – Director of Programming
Rhea Storr – Trailer
Siavash Minoukadeh – Programme & Marketing Coordinator / Expanded Realities Programmer
Tabatha Vaughan – Marketing Assistant
Will Swinburne – Technical Manager
Venue coordinators: Stina Krage, Alice Maestrini, Ann Palomares, Yao Tu.
Programme advisors & pre-selectors: Jonathan Ali, Salvador Amores, Wanling Chen, Abiba Coulibaly, Jesse Cumming, Elizabeth Dexter, Carmen Gray, Martin Grennberger, Shai Heredia, Anjana Janardhan, Chrystel Oloukoi.
Programme & texts: Jonathan Ali, Laurence Avis, Huda Awan, Matthew Barrington, Laverne Caprice, Hyun Jin Cho, George Clark, Abiba Coulibaly, Elizabeth Dexter, Saeed Taji Farouky, Elena Gorfinkel, Simon Liu, Emily Mason, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Siavash Minoukadeh, María Palacios Cruz, Jessica Sarah Rinland, Sophia Satchell-Baeza, Lucy Wardley, Oliver Wright.
Branding and Design: GIRL and Design Office of Jonathan.
2024 Festival Trailer – ‘surfaces’ by Rhea Storr
‘surfaces’ is a map across a few sites of historic Caribbean organising in London: the former West Indian Students Union, now the High commission for St Lucia and Dominica, the West Indian Cultural Centre in Hornsey, currently closed and in disrepair, New Beacon Books, connected to the ‘Caribbean Artist Movement’ and the Keskidee, a site for Black arts and organising which closed in 1991. These locations of Caribbean life were the spaces which held community for politicians, theatre makers, important debates, artists, writers, parent’s groups, dances and talks. Their histories are not immediately visible or accessible.
Rhea Storr is an artist filmmaker who explores the representation of Black and mixed-race cultures. Often working in photochemical film, Storr considers counter-cultural ways of producing moving-image.
Sonic interventions
This year, the festival has commissioned Mo’min Swaitat, founder of the Palestinian Sound Archive and the Majazz Project, to curate a series of playlists that will play in cinemas before and after festival screenings, with the intention of integrating Palestinian voices and culture across this edition of the festival.
The Palestinian Sound Archive is an archive of rare tapes and vinyl from Palestine and beyond, spanning field recordings of weddings to revolutionary tracks and synth-heavy 80s funk. Many of these were acquired from a former record label in Jenin in the north of the West Bank. The Majazz Project is a research project borne out of the archive, focused around sampling, remixing and reissuing vintage Palestinian and Arabic cassettes. The aim behind Majazz Project is to safeguard the Palestinian sound archive and to make it more accessible in online and physical formats.
Open City Documentary Festival would like to thank:
AHRC, Alchemy Film & Arts (Milo Clenshaw, Rachael Disbury, Michael Pattison), Altahabana Films (Luis Tejera), Thom Andersen, Another Gaze (Daniella Shreir), Association Jocelyne Saab (Mathilde Rouxel), Auguste Orts (Marie Logie, Eva van Tongeren), Erika Balsom, Sam Barry-Parker, Bertha DocHouse (Tom Dwyer, Jasmine Haniff, Jenny Horwell, Sean Parnell, Max Tindley, Elizabeth Wood), Barbican (Matthew Barrington, Susie Evans, Vania Gonzalvez), Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (Elisa Kay, Myriam Mouflih, Peter Taylor), BFI (Simon Duffy, Will Fowler, Rod Rhule), British Council (Jay Arnold, Fiona Fletcher, Briony Hanson), Cinema du Réel (Catherine Bizern, Olivia Cooper-Hadjian, Antoine Thirion), Cinenova (Louise Shelley, Charlotte Procter), Cineteca di Bologna (Andrea Meneghelli), Close-Up Film Centre (Damien Sanville, Jake Wardle), Iris Cohen, Kieron Corless, Courtisane Festival (Pieter-Paul Mortier, Ditte Claus), CREAM (University of Westminster), day for night (Sonali Joshi), Jemma Desai, Diplomatic Representation of Flanders in the UK (Bart Brosius, Jeroen Deckmyn), Doc Society (Sanne Jehoul, Luke Moody), Documentary Film Council (Emily Copley, Steve Presence), Azza El Hassan, Essay Film Festival (Matthew Barrington, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Janet McCabe), Yannis Falconer-Johnson, Saeed Taji Farouky, Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch (Tomás Rautenstrauch), Filmform (Andreas Bertman, Elsa Forsman, Anna-Karin Larsson), FLAMIN (Rose Cupit, Maggie Ellis, Duncan Poulton), Diane Gabrysiak, Genesis Cinema (James Hayes, Callum Pawlett Howell, Laura Perrachon), Elena Gorfinkel, Harvard Film Archive (Brittany Gravely, Haden Guest, Mark Johnson), HATANO Yukie, Therese Henningsen, ICA (Steven Cairns, David Powell, Nicolas Raffin, Daniel Turner), Icarus Films, Insight Lighting (Brendan Clarke, Emma Smith), INA (Léa Leray), Najrin Islam, Kamal Aljafari Productions (Flavia Mazzarino), Karma Drinks (Gabby Baxter), Jasleen Kaur Sethi, David Leister, Lightcone (Miguel Armas, Dalva Deshogues, Eleni Gioti), Lithuanian Embassy to the UK (Ula Tornau), LUMA Foundation (James Mackay, Friedrich von Brühl), LUX (Matt Carter, Benjamin Cook, Hanan Coumal, Sophia Musa, Sun Park, Charlotte Procter), Majazz Project (Mo’min Swaitat), Ricardo Matos Cabo, MoreThan Films (Emma Caviezel, Queralt Pons Serra), Chie Moriwaki, Aily Tanaka Nash, National Film and Television School (Jessica Darvill, Sandra Eggleston, Sandra Hebron), No Name Cinema, not/nowhere (Taylor LeMelle, Sally Moussawi, Daniella Valz Gen), Pressure Drop Brewery (Clare Doherty), Rikke Osterlund, Miranda Pennell, Pong (Alex Gerbaulet), Positive East (Ian Montgomery), Punto de Vista International Film Festival, Morgan Quaintance, Lis Rhodes, Rich Mix (Helen Baldwin, Jack Birch, Dennis Cooke, Michael Crowe, Aagya Pradhan, Martha Rumney), Elhum Shakerifar, Sisu (Eva Coulibaly-Willis), Rania Stephan, T A P E Collective (Isra Al Kassi), Tate Film (Valentine Umansky, Beatriz García-Velasco), The Common Press, Mark Toscano, Chloé Trayner, Matt Turner, UCL (Athar Ahmad, Richard Alwyn, Laurence Avis, James Bull, Wendy Chandler, Simba Chivaka, Andrea De Santis, Dieter Deswarte, Ellen Evans, Caroline Garaway, Haidy Geismar, Ana Ghica, Ruth Harper, Martin Holbraad, Keiko Homewood, Lasse Johansson, Savannah Lahtinen, Dinah Lammiman, Ed Lawrenson, Angela McArthur, Mailis Merisalu, Tomoyo Miyakawa, Richard Palmer, Eleonora Passelli, Lucy Parker, Chris Pettit-Mee, Bethany Privitera, Spencer Samuel, Michael Stewart, Emma Wade), University of Bristol, VIDEA S.P.A. (Alessandro Vito), Mark & Frances Webber, Henri Williams, Federico Windhausen, Mohanad Yaqubi, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (HAMA Haruka).
We would also like to thank all festival volunteers, all participating filmmakers, artists & speakers.