Open City Documentary Festival is delighted to announce the winners of the 2019 festival awards, as well as the recipient of the award for the inaugural Assembly documentary development lab – granting £10,000 in development funding after a pitch that took place on Thursday.

The winner of Assembly 2019, receiving £10,000 in feature documentary development funding is Miko Revereza for Nowhere Near.

Assembly is a project-based intensive workshop for international filmmakers working on their first or second feature. The workshop programme took place between 31st August and 3rd September.

The closed pitch took place on 5th September, and the judging panel consisted of Chloe Trayner, Festival Director for Open City Documentary Festival and Director of Assembly, Charlotte Cook, Co-Founder & Executive Producer of Field of Vision, and Tabitha Jackson, Director of the Documentary Film Program at the Sundance Institute. 

About the awarded project, Chloe Trayner said “A singular vision with a clear authored voice, Nowhere Near, as presented at Assembly, is a distinctly personal interrogation of borders, migration and ideas around what home can mean. It sees a filmmaker familiar with flux responding to a pivotal moment through their art, transforming lived experience into something urgent and politically vital, capable of communicating across great distances.

At the start of the workshop, when first presenting his project Miko stated that he was seeking to achieve untethered creative freedom in his artistic practice. We are happy to have been able to provide a space that can contribute towards facilitating that, and an award that can help it to continue.”

Find out more about Assembly here.