We’re happy to announce our Pre-Selector Panel for Open City Documentary Festival 2021. Including new and returning faces, we’re please to be welcoming seven individuals who will be watching and determining submissions into this year’s festival.

You can discover more about our panel below.

As a reminder, submissions are now open for the 2021 festival. We are welcoming short, mid-length, feature, audio and cross-media non-fiction projects.

Wanling Chen is a programmer and translator. Although Wanling started volunteering and working in small independent festivals and screening events, and discovered her passion for documentary films when she was in university, her career actually began in the marketing department of a motorcycle company in 2006. She became a freelance translator in 2011 and has since translated more than two hundred films and programmes including fiction, documentary, animation and TV series. In 2012 and 2013, she was the programme coordinator for CNEX Chinese Doc Forum. She joined the programming team of Taiwan International Documentary Festival in 2013, one of many projects of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute, where she oversees the TIDF Competition and much more. She is now a programmer for TIDF and the Director for the Documentary Office of TFAI, and has been invited as a guest speaker, a member of jury and a decision-maker for various events and festivals. Wanling holds a MA in Film and Screen Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is now based in Taipei with two cats.

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.

Emily Wright is a film programmer, curator and filmmaker who grew up in Portugal and now lives in London.  She is co-founder and curator of Ficción/no/Ficción at the Cinemateca de Bogotá – an annual showcase exploring new tendencies in nonfiction and ‘hybrid’ cinema. She has worked for various festivals including MIDBO and Sheffield Doc/Fest.  Alongside her curatorial work, she continues to work as a freelance producer and creative consultant on nonfiction films, including documentaries for The New Yorker, VICE HBO, The Atlantic and The Guardian. Her filmmaking work has received generous support from Ford Foundation, Points North Institute, Heinrich Böll Foundation, and Proimágenes Colombia (FDC). She is interested in nonfiction films that question established regimes of visibility and audibility and which draw from artistic, archival, ethnographic and performative registers.

Marcus Jack (he/him) is a curator and writer based in Glasgow. He is currently completing an AHRC-funded PhD at The Glasgow School of Art investigating the history of artists’ moving image in Scotland and is the editor of DOWSER (2020–), a new publication series on the same field. In 2015, he founded Transit Arts, an organisation for the exhibition of artists’ moving image, and has developed projects with partners including Alchemy Film & Arts, ATLAS, Document Film Festival, the Goethe-Institut, Glasgow Short Film Festival and Tyneside Cinema. Jack’s writing has been published by ICA London, MAP Magazine and Videoclub. He is a trustee of Glasgow Artists’ Moving Image Studios and sits on the Steering Committee of the British Art Network.

Jonathan Ali is a film curator and writer based in London. He is Director of Programming for Miami’s Third Horizon Film Festival, and half of the Twelve30 Collective, an initiative dedicated to screening Caribbean cinema in the UK.

Anjana Janardhan is a designer and writer based in London and has written about film and visual culture for publications including the BFI, Sight & Sound, Non-Fiction, Port Magazine, Wilma Journal and Screen Queens.

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.