The 15th edition of Open City Documentary Festival, celebrating the art of non-fiction filmmaking, will take place across venues in London from 6–11 May 2025.

We are delighted to announce special programmes Moving Statics: the films of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill curated by Audrey Lam and Keegan O’ Connor, Joycelyne Saab’s Egypts, 1976 – 1989 curated by Elhum Shakerifar and Mathilde Rouxel and Sanrizuka – Notes on a Struggle organised by Ricardo Matos Cabo.

The full festival programme will be announced on 3 April.

Moving Statics: the films of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill

Over a period of fifty years, Australian filmmaking couple Arthur (1938-) and Corinne Cantrill (1928-2025) sought to discover new visual languages and new ways of accessing and rendering landscape through the medium of 16mm film. Their vast body of work – encompassing documentary and experimental film, multi-screen installation, performance, and sound art – repeatedly stages “journeys” into unfamiliar terrain, investigating the creative feedback between environment and art, landform and film-form, shape and light.   

The Cantrills’ work is held in major international archives and galleries, including the Royal Film Archive of Belgium (Brussels), Arsenal (Berlin), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne), the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (Canberra), and MoMA (New York). They were the first Australian subjects of MoMA’s Cineprobe series in 1975, with two further retrospectives in 1988 and 2000. This retrospective at Open City tracks their travels and movements as filmmakers – the development of their innovative practice at the cross-section of cinema, photography, sound design, and performance. 

Curated by Audrey Lam and Keegan O’Connor. 

With thanks to the Cantrill family, the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Arsenal, Lightcone and the Australian High Commission in the United Kingdom. 

Jocelyne Saab’s Egypts, 1976 – 1989

Pioneering Lebanese director Jocelyne Saab is best known for her films about the Lebanese civil war and Palestinian resistance, but she turned her camera to many subjects beyond her native Lebanon – most notably in Egypt, Western Sahara, Iran and Vietnam – where her distinct style of filmmaking – inquisitive, personal, playful – enabled poetic portraits at the same time as producing unique, often atypical, historical documents.  

Jocelyne Saab first went to Egypt in 1973 to cover the October war for French television. She remained in close contact with the many left-wing activists she met at that time, and returned to Cairo in 1977, soon after the January “bread riots”. When she eventually was able to return to Egypt in 1986, she did so from Paris, where she had exiled herself to, after the destruction of her own home in the Lebanese civil war. She was curious about how Egyptian society was changing, how tradition echoed into the everyday. The films she made at this time – The Ghosts of Alexandria, The Cross of the Pharaohs, The Architect of Luxor and The Rise of Fundamentalism – were gathered under the title “Egypt ? Egypts…” as if different facets of the same portrait. Made three years later, in 1989, Al’Alma’, Belly Dancers continues the same line of reflection and positions culture as a potent tool of resistance, particularly against the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.  

This programme of six films made by Saab in Egypt between 1977 and 1989 offers a slant insight into the evolution of Saab’s political perspectives over time, and a novel understanding of her enduring commitment to justice and freedom. These new restorations are presented for the first time at Open City.

Curated by Elhum Shakerifar and Mathilde Rouxel.

Sanrizuka – Notes on a Struggle

In 1966, the Japanese government announced plans to build an international airport near Tokyo, in the rural areas of Sanrizuka and Shibayama. This decision was imposed on local farmers without consultation, with the state assuming it could acquire the land without significant opposition. Instead of passively accepting dispossession, the farmers’ resistance grew into a long-term struggle to defend not only their land but an entire way of life. The resistance in Sanrizuka drew solidarity from radical student movements and other grassroots organisations across Japan to preserve the commons. Over the decades, the struggle evolved through phases of political intensity, pushing back against state abuse. 

This programme explores Sanrizuka through documentaries, archival footage, and documents spanning four decades, including rushes shot between 1968 and 1977 by Ogawa Productions, a filmmaking collective immersed in the struggle. The programme also includes films such as Sanrizuka Notes 3 – The March of the Earth (1979) by Fukuda Katsuhiko, a former member of Ogawa Pro who continued making films on his own in Sanrizuka; a rare set of slides from 1978; and materials from a project made in 2024 to preserve images of  remaining agricultural fields where the former village of Heta used to be, one of the main focus of resistance in the 1970s and where Ogawa Productions lived, an area soon to be cleared for the airport’s planned expansion.

Programme organised by Ricardo Matos Cabo, with thanks to Aikawa Yoichi. Materials courtesy of the Narita Airport and Community Historical Museum, the Athénée Français Tokyo, Hatano Yukie, Cinémathèque de Toulouse, ISKRA and PARC (Pacific Asia Resource Centre). 

Image credits:
Image 1: Still from Bouddi (Arthur & Corinne Cantrill, 1970)
Image 2: Photo courtesy Jocelyne Saab Association
Image 3: Photo by Ogawa Productions (Courtesy of Narita Community and Airport Museum)