We are delighted to announce the participants of the Another Gaze led Critics Workshop at Open City Documentary Festival 2026.

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. In 2022, they launched a small publishing imprint, Another Gaze Editions.

These selected participants will have the chance to develop their writing across various forms.

The critics selected to attend the workshop are listed below:

Amari Rose Leigh is a film producer and researcher focused on experimental nonfiction moving image practices. As a documentary producer, Leigh has worked on award-winning films that have screened at major festivals and on leading streaming platforms, including HBO and Paramount+. Leigh recently served as the associate producer on the film The Devil Is Busy, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. As a researcher and writer, her work explores Black aesthetic disruptions to the documentary form. Leigh is a current MPhil candidate in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge. 

Ane Lopez is a Basque programmer and artist based in Glasgow. She has programmed for Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Femspectives and Glasgow Short Film Festival and recently she took part in the Scottish Documentary Institute’s Bridging the Gap Scheme as a Producer with Filmmaker Holly Marie Parnell. Ane is the co-founder of A+E, a now dormant collective of artists working together towards a post-oil vision and she is currently working in laying the foundations of Burnieshed, a newly formed artist-led initiative located at the heart of a rewilding project in rural Perthshire. 

Deirdre McAteer is a writer and critic from Derry. She has previously worked with The Foyle Film Festival and has written essays for Open City Documentary Festival. She has an MA in English: Issues in Modern Culture, and lives in East London. 

Emily Jisoo Bowles is a British-Korean film critic, translator, and a film programmer at Queer East festival. 

Emily Rose Apter is a Brooklyn-based cultural worker, whose work explores overlapping spheres of cultural production, (counter)archives, and collective struggle. She works in public programming for film and cultural heritage organizations, formerly as Director of Programming for Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem and currently as Director of Special Projects for Solidarity Media Network. Emily has programmed for Spectacle Theater, the Film-Makers‘ Cooperative, Maysles Cinema, Museum of the City of NY, and Mayday Space, among other cultural institutions and universities. She has written for The Baffler, Screen Slate, Millennium Film Journal, Analog Cookbook, Cinémovil, and Chute Film Coop. Her zines are available through Maysles Documentary Center and Printed Matter, and her film, Bliss.jpg, through DA Films. 

Hannah de Feyter is a curator at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, based on Ngunnawal + Ngambri country. At the NFSA she works on a variety of creative and collaborative projects including the flagship restoration program NFSA Restores which digitises, preserves and shares cult and classic Australian films; and Sounds of Australia, the archive’s annual capsule of iconic Australian sounds. She has a research focus on Australian experimental and artist film. Hannah programs an irregular microcinema, Third Run Cinema, and is the former co-director of the Stronger Than Fiction Documentary Film Festival. She is a classically trained musician and performs live scores to silent films with her experimental solo viola project ALPHAMALE.

Irene Rihuete Varea is a PhD candidate at Brown University. Her research interests include Latin American and Spanish cinemas, documentary theory and ecocriticism. Her work has been published or is forthcoming at Comparative Cinema, Kamchatka: Revista de Análisis Cultural, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). She is a film programmer, and has participated in curatorial projects at The Museum of Modern Art. 

Lily Peng writes fiction, poetry and criticism. She is interested in independent Chinese cinema, artists’ moving-image and anything that treats desire or the body as medium. Her MA thesis was on Chantal Akerman and Babette Mangolte. She is from Beijing and lives in London. 

Lola Lemke is a writer and researcher from Mexico based in London. Her work centres on experimental cinema and contemporary documentary, with a focus on Latin American and feminist practices. She has taken part in Los Experimentos’ Latin American Film Criticism Workshop and has programmed films for local community cinemas. She holds an MA in Film Studies from King’s College London.

Rebecka Öhrström Kann is a writer and researcher interested in international networks of solidarity through film and historicisation of the Non-Aligned Movement. She works as a Research Assistant in Tate’s Research department and runs the newsletter Seeing Further, a listing for self-organised film in London. 

Image credit (left-to-right, top-to-bottom): Amari Rose Leigh, Ane Lopez, Deirdre McAteer, Emily Jisoo Bowles, Emily Rose Apter, Hannah de Feyter, Irene Rihuete Varea, Lily Peng, Lola Lemke, Rebecka Öhrstöm Kann