Back in October, we posted an open call for pre-selectors to help us view and assess submissions for our 2020 festival. We are happy to announce the six individuals who will make up our Pre-Selection Panel. You can read about them and their varying backgrounds below.

In addition, our Programme Advisor Jesse Cumming will return for a third festival.

Submissions are open now for Open City Documentary Festival 2020. We are accepting short, mid and feature length non-fiction films, short audio documentaries, and cross-media projects.

Jonathan Ali is a film programmer, curator and writer based in London. He has worked for various film festivals including the East End Film Festival, Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival. He is Director of Programming for the Caribbean-themed Third Horizon Film Festival in Miami, Florida, and is also a programmer for the 2020 edition of the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival in Hawick, Scotland. He is the bearded half of the Twelve30 Collective, a new initiative dedicated to screening Caribbean cinema in the UK.

Laura Davis is a writer and artist filmmaker. She participated in the 2019 Locarno Critics Academy and is currently developing her second short Storm Ophelia at the South London Gallery. She takes issue with the ‘non-fiction’ premise attached to the documentary genre and is especially interested in works original in their forms of storytelling and textual interrogation.

Carmen Gray is a freelance journalist, film critic and programmer who grew up in rural New Zealand and now lives in Berlin. She has written on culture and politics for publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Sight & Sound, Modern Times Review, The Calvert Journal, and The Village Voice, and she is the former Film Editor of Dazed & Confused magazine in London. She is on the selection committee for the International Short Film Festival Winterthur in Switzerland, and has curated special screenings at film festivals in Portugal and Russia. In 2018, she was Theorist in Residence for experimental film at Das Weisse Haus gallery in Vienna. In her previous career as a language teacher, she completed year-long contracts in Moscow, Seoul, Prague, and Buenos Aires.

Marcus Jack is a curator, writer and researcher based in Glasgow. He is the founder of Transit Arts, an organisation for the exhibition of artists’ moving image, and has developed projects in partnership with ATLAS, Document Human Rights Film Festival, CCA Glasgow, GFT, Glasgow Short Film Festival, Goethe-Institut, Scottish Contemporary Art Network and Tyneside Cinema. Jack is a Research Associate at LUX Scotland, coordinates the Margaret Tait 100 centenary programme, and is currently undertaking an AHRC-funded PhD mapping the history of artists’ moving image in Scotland at The Glasgow School of Art. He is a member of the Steering Committee and Early Career Curator Group of the British Art Network, a collaboration between Tate and the Paul Mellon Centre, recently juried the TENT Academy Awards, Rotterdam, and undertook a curatorial exchange to Taipei organised by Videoclub.

Anjana Janardhan is a designer and writer based in London. She has written about film and visual culture for publications including the BFI, Sight & Sound, Wilma Journal and Port Magazine and is currently developing a film season at Deptford Cinema exploring girlhood onscreen.

Viktoriya Kalashnikova is a Kazakhstani film festival programmer and producer based in Berlin. She works as a program advisor for documentary films for Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and previously for Sheffield Doc/Fest. She also regularly works in various industry roles at such festivals as IDFA and DOK.fest Munich, and on documentary film projects in roles of producer, archive researcher, as well as market and festival consultant. She has also served as a program and industry consultant for the Central Asian Documentary Film Festival in Almaty.