Bringing together the writers and publishers of recent books devoted to experimental cinema, many of whom focus on filmmakers from this year’s Open City programme, this encounter will present a range of methodologies of mediation involved in translating the communal, temporal experience of cinema to text and the printed page. 

Panellists will include:

DOWSER, notes on artists moving image in Scotland is a chapbook series founded in 2020 and published by Transit Arts. Sharing fragments, positions and testimonies across registers, including commissioned essays and experimental writing, interviews, and archival republication, the series collates a set of resources from which we might begin to plot histories (and futures) for alternative film and video cultures in Scotland. DOWSER is a non-profit project; each chapbook is released in a limited print edition and as an open access online PDF. / Dr Marcus Jack is a curator, art historian, and Lecturer in Contemporary Art and Curation at the University of Exeter. His research and curatorial work looks for counternarratives in postwar and contemporary culture through analyses of infrastructure, statehood and socio-economics, with a particular emphasis on artists’ film and video.  

Sabzian is an international film magazine offering in-depth and many-voiced reflection on contemporary film experience and culture through online and offline publications, screenings and events, building a bridge between national and international cinephilia, between past and present, between individual and collective imagination. / Gerard-Jan Claes (Belgium, 1987) is a filmmaker, lecturer, author, artistic director of the film magazine Sabzian, and co-founder of Avila, a distributor and VOD-platform for Belgian cinema. As a filmmaker, he collaborates with Olivia Rochette (Belgium, 1987). Their shared filmography consists of Because We Are Visual (2010), Rain (2012), Grands travaux (2016), Mitten (2019) and Kind Hearts (2022). 

FIELDNOTES is an artist-run publishing project based in Newham in east London. We produce a print journal twice a year and a programme of public workshops, mentoring opportunities, radio broadcasts, screenings and readings. Founded in 2020, FIELDNOTES aims to promote and support non-conforming creative practices that pioneer new cultural forms. 

Éditions Atlas is a publishing project dedicated to collating and sharing textual responses to cinema which critically engage with the medium’s intersections with topics including geopolitics, identity and representation, mobility, imagined geographies and the ethics of lens-based practices. Commissioning new art works and essays responding to singular cinematic themes, works, moments, practices and individuals, their publications offer an analytical, multidisciplinary and tangible extension of on-screen antics.  Éditions Atlas was founded by Abiba Coulibaly in Spring 2024, stemming from longterm experiments creating programme notes for their project Brixton Community Cinema, in collaboration with Em—Dash, a South East London based studio + press with an emphasis on self-publishing. Em—Dash is operated by Aarushi Matiyani + Saundra Liemantoro.

Daniella Shreir is the founding co-editor of Another Gaze and co-publisher of Another Gaze Editions, and the creator of streaming platform Another Screen. She is also a translator from French and a member of the selection committee of the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes.

Huda Awan (moderator) is a writer based in London. She is the editor of Open City Texts, a platform for new writing on new non-fiction film.