Welcome to our first spring festival! It is not so long since we last welcomed you to Open City Documentary Festival but a lot has happened in these few months. Now more than ever we feel the urgency to claim the cinema as a space of resistance, solidarity and community. But is that enough?  

Throughout the festival programme, we want to highlight and celebrate the work and resilience of Palestinian artists, and to point to absences and erasures through their presence. There is never a single “theme” to an edition of Open City Documentary Festival, but the importance of bearing witness, of observation and documentation, is an invisible thread that binds together much of our programme this year. From the Folk Memory Project to the Expanded Realities exhibition, to the grandmothers that Elena Gorfinkel eloquently posits as capable of materialising “history as lived, relayed, told and retold”, many works speak to the urgency of recovering and recording lost memories and hidden histories. That loss is poignantly felt in Stolen Film Imaginary, an event conceived by Saeed Taji Farouky to complement screenings of Palestinian militant cinema, in which invited guests narrate lost Palestinian works. He writes: “This is a cinema of absence and its corollary: the invincibility of longing and imagination.”

Our 2024 edition is a collaborative effort and we would like to thank all the guest programmers, collectives and organisations who have contributed to this year’s festival, including Alchemy Film & Arts, Artists for Palestine, Cinenova, Doc Society, the Essay Film Festival, LUX, the New Black Film Collective, the Palestinian Sound Archive, Sisu and T A P E collective. Thanks to Jonathan Ali’s long-standing commitment to showcase the work of Caribbean filmmakers in London, we are able to present the work of Afro-Cuban filmmaker Nicolas Guillén Landrián in partnership with the Barbican. Sophia Satchell-Baeza brings us Amy Halpern’s recent 16mm films; a pair of screenings that pay tribute to an important filmmaker after her untimely passing. We have collaborated with Annabelle Aventurin and Léa Morin from the Non-Aligned Film Archives since 2022 and this year they focus on Madeleine Beauséjour, presenting a new restoration of her only completed film Koman i lé la sours (1987). Hyun Jin Cho has not only put together a retrospective of the Folk Memory Project, she has also thought up with us a new space for families to enjoy experimental film work. Our two Filmmakers in Focus, Simon Liu and Jessica Sarah Rinland have also curated screenings that call attention to films made in Hong Kong, and the Argentine avant-garde filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch respectively. Margaret Salmon’s book Cinematographa is the point of departure for several events that highlight the analogue camerawork of an exceptional group of intergenerational, intersectional women artists. Our opening night film Sunless Haven will be accompanied by a selection of works drawn together by George Clark to evoke “worlds within worlds” at various border and transient zones.

We have always believed that Open City Documentary Festival is both by and for the non-fiction community in London. We feel grateful that whilst so many colleagues and like-minded organisations suffer threats or are being silenced, that we continue, for a 14th year, to be able to facilitate an environment in which we can gather for seven rich, intensive days, to watch existing films and dream future ones, but also to share, debate and learn from one another. If not to do this, what are festivals even for?