Open City Documentary Festival 2025

We are delighted to announce the full programme for its 15th edition, taking place in person from 6–11 May 2025. Throughout the week we’ll be screening 101 new and historical films across London at our venues Barbican, Bertha DocHouse, Close-Up Film Centre, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Tate Modern and Rich Mix, where the Festival Hub will be based.

Opening and Closing Nights

The 15th edition opens with Siticulosa (Maeve Brennan, 2025), a film based on the artist’s multidisciplinary research which considers the relationship between archaeology, geology and agriculture in the Puglian landscape.

The festival will close with Maxime Jean-Baptiste‘s debut feature-length film Kouté vwa which follows Melrick, a young teenage boy, as he spends a summer in French Guiana with his grandmother Nicole. The film traces conversations between Melrick and Nicole that reveal the tragic circumstances of the death of her son Lucas Diomar who was murdered 11 years earlier.

Wider Film Programme

The festival will present special programmes Moving Statics: the films of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill curated by Audrey Lam and Keegan O’Connor, Jocelyne Saab’s Egypts, 1976 – 1989 curated by Elhum Shakerifar and Mathilde Rouxel and Sanrizuka – Notes on a Struggle organised by Ricardo Matos Cabo.

The programme Just Evidence, organised in conjunction with the publication of World Records, Volume 9: Just Evidence, examines forensic modes of investigation that have emerged as a dominant form of artist and activist media practice but can perpetuate the oppressive forms of social, legal, and factual authority that artists and activists are often struggling against. Featuring screenings, workshops highlighting the work of artists, filmmakers, and investigators who are interrogating, subverting, and rerouting forensic methods, it also includes a performance by Maxime Jean-Baptiste at Tate Modern.

In collaboration with the Austrian Film Museum, VALIE EXPORT considers the career of one of the most radical audiovisual artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, whose work spans 16mm film, video, expanded cinema performances and digital art. The programme is a presentation of canonical and lesser-known films by the artist and coincides with the publication of a new book on VALIE EXPORT’s film and video works.

Austrian film historian, and former director of the Austrian Film Museum, Alexander Horwath will also present The Clock or: 89 minutes of “Free Time”, a special programme that considers notions of cinematic temporality, leisure and the history of the 20th century.

A special screening of Voices from Gaza (Antonia Cacci and Maysoon Pachachi, 1989) and Palestine Will Win (Jean Pierre Olivier de Sardan, 1969) offers audiences an opportunity to reflect on the nature of solidarity and militancy in cinema today. Partition (Diana Allan, 2025) is a film project grounded in academic rigour that challenges the power of the archive and demonstrates how the displacement of Palestinians has extended far beyond the original Nakba of 1948.

In response to the latest, autobiographical film by the legendary British avant-garde filmmaker, the programme Being John Smith brings together four works that explore, in different ways, what it is to “be” John Smith, and will include the UK festival premiere of Being John Smith after screenings at festivals worldwide.

The launch of Open City’s Non-Fiction 07: The Elephant, guest edited by Elhum Shakerifar will provide a space to gather and listen in to the ideas at the heart of the journal. So Mayer and Jenny Clarke will discuss their pieces, and Barby Asante will lead a breathing workshop. Holding the potential of poetry and conversation close, the event also includes a screening of Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña’s short film What Is Poetry to You (1980). Also launching during the festival is the double issue of Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ). Film archivist Esther Harris reveals the intricate processes of restoring Lis Rhodes’ influential 1978 film Light Reading. Curator and researcher Sophia Satchell-Baeza will discuss experimental film and psychedelic vision on the hippy trail, as portrayed in David Larcher’s epic and rarely seen 1975 travelogue Monkey’s Birthday.

Filmmakers Kevin Jerome Everson, Luke Fowler, Eva Giolo,  Sally Lawton, Morgan Quaintance, Chiemi Shimada, Elisabeth Subrin, Rhea Storr, Hope Strickland and Malena Szlam also return to the festival with their latest works whilst filmmakers screening at Open City for the first time include Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Dimitri Athiridis, Mourad Ben Amor, Sam Drake, Eitan Efrat and Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Joseph Hillel, Alexander Horwath, Lazare Lazarus, Alex Nevill, Christelle Oyiri, Ewelina Rosinska, Corin Sworn, Eiko Soga, Armand Yervant Tufenkian and Fanfan Zhou.

Expanded Realities 

This year’s Expanded Realities Exhibition features an audio project, a 2-channel video installation, an automated laboratory performance and a lecture performance. Borderline Visible (Ant Hampton, 2023) uses a book of images and text fragments which the reader is navigated through by an accompanying soundtrack that activates and reworks the non-linear publication. for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world (Gala Hernández López, 2024) proposes a speculative conversation with cryptographer Hal Finney, who was cryostatically frozen in 2014.

Drinking Brecht is an interactive installation by Sister Sylvester which combines Bertolt Brecht’s theatrical practice and legacy with the scientific study of DNA to critique notions of purity and authorship. Returning In Focus artist Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Eyes That Shine at Night is a lecture-performance that will further explore the technologies used to make images of animals and the aesthetic and political implications of these forms of capture.

Find out more about the full programme here.