We are happy to announce the Opening and Closing films of the 15th edition of Open City Documentary Festival.

Opening Night: Siticulosa
Tuesday 6 May, Barbican, 6.30pm

Siticulosa (2025) and An Excavation (2022) are two parts of a multidisciplinary project from artist Maeve Brennan that sets out a careful study into the international traffic of looted antiquities. Whilst the focus in An Excavation is on a series of 4th century BCE Italian vases discovered in a trove of seized crates at Geneva Freeport in 2014, with her latest film Siticulosa Brennan has turned her attention to the looted landscapes of the Southern Italian region of Puglia. Tracing the potential looting sites for the items recovered in Geneva in 2014, Brennan considers the buried histories beneath the surface and the relationship between this territory its people, their past and present.

An Excavation
Maeve Brennan | 2022 | UK | 20’ | Digital | English spoken

An Excavation begins with text on screen: “In 2014, 45 crates of looted antiquities were discovered at Geneva Freeport. Three of the crates, containing 32 cardboard boxes, were sent to archaeologists to search for criminal evidence.” What follows over the course of the next twenty minutes is the meticulous reconstruction of an ancient vase – “object 16” – pieced back together from fragments that were likely contained across several of the recovered cardboard boxes. The two archaeologists at work, Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis and Dr. Vinnie Norskov, are not only reconstituting an object; they are also piecing together the evidence of a crime – like forensic detectives in a murder scene.

Siticulosa
Maeve Brennan | 2025 | UK, Denmark | 45’ | Digital | Italian spoken, English subtitles

After a series of projects forensically examining the largely illicit international antiquities market, Brennan turns her meticulous gaze to the landscape the looted objects were extracted from in Puglia, Southern Italy. “Parched” or “very dry”, as in Horace’s description of the region (Siticulosa Apulia), continues to be an accurate description of the dominant conditions that allow for the appearance of crop marks to indicate the presence of archaeological sites beneath. Siticulosa’s multidisciplinary research considers the relationship between archaeology, geology and agriculture in the Puglian landscape. It is a study of a territory, and the marks and wounds that it bears of a history of pillage, but also a portrait of the people that inhabit it (farmers, antique dealers, amateur archaeologists, local historians) and their symbiotic relationship to the landscape.

Closing Night: Kouté Vwa
Sunday 11 May, ICA, 7pm

Kouté Vwa (Listen to the Voices)
Maxime Jean-Baptiste | 2024 | Belgium, France, French Guiana | Digital | French, Guianese Creole spoken, English subtitles

The debut feature-length work by Maxime Jean–Baptiste follows Melrick, a young teenage boy, as he spends a summer in French Guiana with his grandmother Nicole. The film traces conversations between Melrick and Nicole that reveal the tragic circumstances of the death of her son Lucas Diomar who was murdered 11 years earlier.

The long-lasting repercussions of his death are revealed through a spectrum of voices from the wider community. Combining scripted scenes with documentary and intimate archival material, Jean-Baptiste develops a richly layered portrait of Lucas, the absence at the centre of the film, and of French Guiana itself – situated on the north eastern coast of South America, it remains a department of France. Made collectively in collaboration with family and friends, Jean-Baptiste challenges the colonial present of French Guiana and offers a vibrant presentation of the place and people, its culture and music. Through this chorus Kouté Vwa (translated as ‘listen to the voices’) proposes ways to dismantle past trauma and cycles of violence through collective expression.

Presented in collaboration with Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival and World Records Journal.