The 16th edition of Open City Documentary Festival will take place in venues across London from 14-19 April.

We are delighted to announce special programmes In Focus: Onyeka Igwe, Ken and Flo Jacobs: Seeing Through Film and Interstitial Cinema: the films of Artavazd Pelechian.

The full festival programme will be announced on Thursday 5 March.

In Focus: Onyeka Igwe

Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher working across cinema and installation. Her practice brings together sound, image, text, and re-purposed archival materials—including oral histories, government records, gesture, dance, and song—to surface obscured or marginalised histories. Through an engagement with spatial, sensorial, and embodied forms of knowledge, Igwe explores alternative ways of understanding the past. Drawing on the residues of colonial archives and protest movements, her work foregrounds collective memory and lived experience. Sound and rhythm are used as critical tools to interrupt landscapes and architecture. Igwe’s work speaks to the complexities of history, whilst offering a careful investigation into the ethics of filmmaking practices through a process of re-finding and re-situating her materials. 

Ken & Flo Jacobs: Seeing Through Film

The retrospective Seeing Through Film celebrates the work and lives of Ken and Flo Jacobs, who both passed away in 2025. It coincides with the publication of I Walked Into My Shortcomings, an anthology of Jacobs’ writings edited by William Rose for The Visible Press. One of the American avant-garde’s most prolific figures, Ken Jacobs (1933-2025), and his wife and lifelong collaborator Flo Jacobs (1941-2025), were an integral part of the New York alternative film scene. A true and native New Yorker, Jacobs studied painting with Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann but quickly gravitated toward film. From the monumental Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (which will be presented as a festival prologue) to the Nervous Magic Lantern performances and more recent digital and 3D explorations, Jacobs was an artist whose work is an uncompromised declaration of love for cinema.

With thanks to Azazel Jacobs, William Rose and Mark Webber.

Interstitial Cinema: the films of Artavazd Pelechian

Artavazd Pelechian is one of the greatest montage artists in modern cinema. He was born in 1938 in Armenia, then part of the Soviet Union, and studied at VGIK in Moscow from 1963-68. Over the next thirty years, Pelechian made the majority of his films whilst working at the heart of the Soviet film industry. His films uniquely combine documentary footage from official archives with images shot by the filmmaker himself and his collaborators. Assembled through what he conceptualised as “distance montage”, his films defy traditional distinctions between documentary, fiction and the essay film. The programme Interstitial Cinema: the films of Artavazd Pelechian offers a rare opportunity to see this work in the United Kingdom. As Sight and Sound declared on the occasion of his 2020 feature La Nature: “[the] Armenian director has long been a well-kept secret for cinephiles, but his work has never seemed more relevant and deserves to be better known.”

With thanks to Lilit Sokhakyan, Sona Karapoghosyan, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.

Stills from:
so-called archive (Onyeka Igwe, 2020)
Seeking the Monkey King (Ken Jacobs, 2011)
We (Artavazd Pelechian, 1969)