We are delighted to announce the participants of the Another Gaze led Critics Workshop at Open City Documentary Festival 2025.

Open City is committed to fostering a discursive space that brings together the next generation of filmmakers, critics and other professionals working in the field of non-fiction cinema. Now in its fourth year, the Critics Workshop is an immersive five-day programme developed by the Another Gaze editorial team to discuss the methodologies and practice of a politically, formally engaged film criticism. Together we will cover questions of experimentation, ethics, the place of the “I” in criticism, the role of negative criticism, as well as more practical discussion of the editorial process, pitching and interviewing practices.

Another Gaze was founded in 2016 to provide a nuanced forum for discussion about women as filmmakers, filmic subjects, and spectators. In 2021 they launched Another Screen, an irregular streaming platform, streaming short-term programmes of films by women across modes of production and geographies, with new writing and translations about these works. Both Another Gaze and Another Screen will return from hiatus this year. In 2022 they launched a small publishing imprint, Another Gaze Editions. 

The critics selected to attend the workshop are listed below:

Claire Mullen a producer and editor of sounds, texts and images. She was a fellow with the National Book Critics Circle from 2019-2021, and has published writing and criticism in outlets including The Believer, The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Artsy. Since 2012 she has worked as a sound designer and audio producer for public radio. She is currently a graduate student of film preservation and audiovisual archive studies at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in the Basque Country. 

Clodagh Chapman is a writer and film programmer from London, now based in Manchester. She is a Programme Adviser at Sheffield DocFest, and has previously written for Open City Documentary Festival, and curated events for BFI London Film Festival, BFI Flare and HOME Manchester. Clodagh was a Young Critic at the Almeida Theatre. As a writer and director, Clodagh’s work has screened in both gallery spaces and BAFTA-qualifying festivals worldwide. Clodagh holds an MA in Advanced Theatre Practice from the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama. 

Eleanor Lu is a film curator, researcher, and writer based in London. Her research interests lie in collective space-making through an interdisciplinary approach to film exhibition, as well as the limits of the archive. She has worked with various cultural institutions, including the BFI, the ICA London, and the London Korean Film Festival. Alongside her independent curatorial projects, she currently works as a film programmer for the Hong Kong Film Festival UK. 

Ella Slater is a writer and curator from Manchester. Her work is particularly informed by theories of speculation and critical fabulation, as well as feminism, ecology, and digitality. She currently resides in London, where she is studying for an MA in History of Art at UCL, works in a contemporary art gallery, and regularly writes for art publications. She is particularly interested in both speculation and autofiction as filmic methodology and a critical writing framework. 

Ellie Dobbs is a curator and writer from Hull, based in London. She works as a curator at SET, an arts and community organisation, and is the founder of SET Film Festival, a grassroots platform for artists’ moving image and experimental cinema. Her work explores archival practices, alternative film histories, and collaborative approaches to programming and writing. 

Emily Lewis has lived and worked in London for 10 years. She is a writer interested in labour, improvisational performance and experimental cinema. She has worked in education and as a transcriber. Emily studied The Contemporary MA taught between University of Kent and ICA London. She has worked on projects with SET Social, Montez Press and Soho Reading Series and hopes to organise (and write about) more arts events in the future. 

Lydia de Matos writes, directs, and edits. She’s based in London, where she runs a couple of film clubs, which you can join if you’d like. 

Oliver Dixon is an AHRC-funded PhD student in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge. His PhD research investigates histories of British film collectives, independent film and emergent radical political movements in the long 1970s. His research article on the exhibition practices of the Cinema Action film collective is forthcoming in Moving Image Review and Art Journal. He programmes film screenings for Welsh arts organisations and the London Short Film Festival.  

Stephen Kuster is an incoming PhD student in Screen Cultures at Northwestern University. His research turns to documentary and experimental film to plumb the relationship between film and the ‘world.’ Outside of academia, he also works in independent film production and film programming. 

Winnie Wang is a writer and cultural worker based in Toronto. Their writing has appeared in Cinema Scope, Los Angeles Review of Books, Documentary Magazine, POV and Little White Lies. Winnie is interested in feminist and experimental works of film, documentary and literature, as well as food culture and environmental thought. They hold a B.Sc. in neuroscience and an M.A. in cinema studies from the University of Toronto. 

Image credit (left-to-right, top-to-bottom): Claire Mullen, Clodagh Chapman, Eleanor Lu, Ella Slater, Ellie Dobbs, Emily Lewis, Lydia de Matos, Oliver Dixon, Stephen Kuster, Winnie Wang