The full programme for Open City Documentary Festival 2020 is now online and on-sale, with all events and sessions available to book through our website.

Open City Documentary Festival’s tenth edition will take place online from 9th to 15th September. The festival’s first digital edition will also be the first available internationally, with affordable online screenings available across the UK, special events live-streaming worldwide, and an expansive industry programme that will be available free internationally.

The festival will celebrate the art of non-fiction through 48 new films, 10 cross-media projects, and 3 audio documentaries, featuring new films from 28 different countries. Of the directors presenting new work in the film programme, 54% are women or non-binary filmmakers.

Amongst 3 World Premieres, 3 International Premieres, 5 European premieres, and 29 UK Premieres in the new film programme are films such as: Mehrdad Oskouei’s Sunless Shadows, Gu Xue’s The Choice, Amel Alzakout & Khaled Abdulwahed’s Purple Sea, David Osit’s Mayor, and Valentina Pedicini’s Faith, and Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez’s The American Sector.

Special events this year will be live-streamed worldwide on evenings during the festival. The lineup features new performance lectures from Courtney Stephens and Bassem Saad; a panel discussion and live presentation of Veronika Kusumaryati and Ernst Karel‘s new augmented sound work Expedition Content; a live storytelling session titled You Cannot Close You Eyes to New Horizons; and Seen and Heard, in which the co-curators of the ‘Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist’  will screen selections from this resource and discuss them with their makers.

This year’s Industry Programme will be streamed free internationally for the first time, and includes masterclasses with director Maite Alberdi, producer Anne Fabini, editor Joëlle Bertossa, and audio-producer Latif Nasser and artist Paisley Smith, plus panels on a variety of subjects such as ‘Confronting the Colonial Gaze’, ‘Questioning Authorship’ and ‘Complex Access’.

Expanded Realities, the festival’s cross media (AR/VR/XR+) exhibition has been adapted for browser-based access. Artists include: Tamara Shogaolu, Ingvild Isaksen and Henrietta Williams; and new formats Arcade (a collection of miniature browser-based playable works) and Voyages (interactive essays telling stories of place) offer fresh ideas for online interaction.

The full programme is now online; tickets are available to book now. See you on the internet!