A film festival is a symptom of its time, so how does the 16th edition of Open City Documentary Festival reflect the times we are living in? 
 
The festival starts and ends in Space, but that doesn’t mean that we are keeping our terrestrial woes at a distance. Our opening night film, Artavazd Pelechian’s Our Century (1983), serves as a stark reminder of the many sacrifices made in pursuit of humanity’s Icarus dream at a time when space is becoming increasingly contested and militarised. Closing the festival, Graeme Arnfield’s A Case Against Space focuses on the humans at the heart of space exploration, proposing a speculative narrative around the first organised strike outside the Earth’s orbit. Although it only lasted a day, the astronauts’ gesture of resistance highlighted their excessive workload and would serve to improve future working conditions.  
 
Space is the place. Throughout the festival programme, multiple “spaces” are explored and interrogated: the space of the frame, the space between the frames; time and space are toyed with; audiences are “given the space to draw their own conclusions.” The Expanded Realities exhibition, A Sense of Space, explores the relationship between our senses and the environments around us.  
 
Our mission statement states that we create “an open space” in London to nurture and champion the art of non-fiction cinema. We’ve often referred to our commitment to continuing – for as long as we can – to provide a space for gathering, debate and contemplation. In an age of social fragmentation and increasing isolation, we understand cinema as a communal event and want to revindicate how powerful it can still be to come together in the space of the cinema. 
 
For Ken Jacobs, who we remember with this year’s programme, together with his wife and collaborator Flo, the act of film viewing was central to his filmmaking practice. As William Rose writes in his essay, “Jacobs placed increased responsibility on the viewer, not only to look attentively, but to recognise how meaning is made through context, framing and the politics of viewership itself.” For Jacobs, “attention, patience, and the capacity to see beyond conventional narrative were required of the viewer.”  
 
This is very much what is at stake at a film festival like Open City, the viewing conditions that we aspire to facilitate, a place not to “watch experimental films” but “to watch films experimentally”. 
 
Watching and re-watching are also central to the work of our In Focus artist, Onyeka Igwe, who foregrounds collective memory and lived experience, drawing on the residues of colonial archives and protest movements.  
 
A number of programmes throw light on amateur film practices and the archives that are busy preserving and exhibiting them. Across different geographies, these projects are exemplary of the grassroots activism that put “cameras in the hands of campaigners and marginalised groups to equip them to challenge authority and fight for tangible change,” to quote the words of Ed Webb-Ingall from the London Community Video Archive.  
 
This edition of the festival celebrates the amateur, the cinephile, the film lover. Without going as far as to claim to reflect an end-of-times hedonism, Open City also wants to create a space for joyous celebration. The Sensual Laboratories programme, which also takes over the festival party, reminds us that film can be a fun and sensuous expression of light, colour, sound and movement. 
 
The elements that make the 2026 festival edition reflect a multiplicity of voices and perspectives: a kaleidoscope of radical film practices. We thank our associate programmers Jonathan Ali, Abiba Coulibaly, Marta Calderón, Elizabeth Dexter and Siavash Minoukadeh, our collaborators Jesse Cumming, Saeed Taji Farouky, Hyun Jin Cho, Sophia Satchell-Baeza, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Ed Webb-Ingall, Jennifer Lauren Martin and all the partner organisations that have contributed to shaping this year’s festival programme. 
 
As ever, we remain grateful to University College London, which turns 200 this year, for continuing to enable this space to remain open.