6th–11th
May 2025
across London

Year Round Activity

Current Events

18:30
Thu 12 Mar

Barbican Cinema 2

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As a prologue to the retrospective Seeing Through Film: Ken and Flo Jacobs, Open City Documentary Festival and the Barbican’s Experiments in Film present Ken Jacobs’ 1969 structural film classic. Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son Ken Jacobs, 1969-71, USA, 16mm, silent, 115 min The original Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son was filmed in 1905 by Billy Bitzer (D. W. Griffith’s cinematographer). It is... Read More

Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (Ken Jacobs)

11:00
Sun 01 Feb

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Listen With Your Eyes is an ongoing series of screenings for children of all ages and their grown-up companions. It’s a space where curious minds and open hearts can come together to drift through the worlds of experimental cinema. For this February’s programme, we present a selection of landscape films—landscapes in the widest, wildest sense. These works are closely attuned to the environm... Read More

Listen with your Eyes 5: Experimental Films for Families

Past Events

18:00
Sat 17 Jan

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Carl Elsaesser is an experimental filmmaker whose work blends genres and materials to critically investigate the overarching presence of history without losing sight of individual experiences of human connection. The films in this partial retrospective move between melodrama and residue, offering evidence of cinema’s capacity to mourn, desire, and care. The screening will be followed by an i... Read More

Carl Elsaesser: Vague Images at the Beginning and End of the Day

11:15
Sat 06 Dec

Close-Up Film Centre

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Listen With Your Eyes is an ongoing series of screenings for children of all ages and their grown-up companions. It’s a space where curious minds and open hearts can come together to explore the wonders of experimental cinema. With this programme, we’ve been reflecting on the power of care in the earliest chapters of life. These films honour both the labour and the emotional richness of look... Read More

Listen with your eyes 4: Experimental Film For Families

Sep 10 —
Sep 18

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Presenting restored shorts films of the groundbreaking Puerto Rican film unit, plus Todo Parecía Posible (Everything Seemed Possible), a new archival documentary about the unit and its operations during a key period in Puerto Rico’s modern history, curated by Jonathan Ali. The UK premiere of Todo Parecía Posible takes place at the Barbican on 10th September at 6:30pm in the presence of direc... Read More

Todo Parecía Posible and short films of the Puerto Rican film unit

Apr 18 —
Apr 20

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We are excited to announce the UK premiere of exergue - on documenta 14, screening as a prologue to Open City Documentary Festival 2025. exergue – on documenta Dimitris Athiridis | 2024 | Greece | 848’ | Digital | English, German spoken, English subtitles Structured in 14 episodes (screening over three consecutive days), exergue – on documenta 14  offers a look behind the scenes... Read More

Prologue: exergue – on documenta 14

14:00
Sat 15 Mar

The Living Room, A House for Artists

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Listen with your eyes is an ongoing series of screenings that aims to create a space for children of all ages to engage with and enjoy experimental forms of cinema. By turns playful, beautiful, and idiosyncratic, the films in this programme range from hand-coloured collages and optical printing experiments to studies of movement and dance. Rather than being prescriptive, they invite viewers to ... Read More

Listen with your Eyes at A House For Artists

11:00
Sun 15 Dec

Close-Up Film Centre

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Listen with your eyes is an ongoing series of screenings that aims to create a space for children of all ages to engage with and enjoy experimental forms of cinema. By turns playful, beautiful, and idiosyncratic, the films in this programme range from hand-coloured collages and optical printing experiments to studies of movement and dance. Rather than being prescriptive, they invite viewers to ... Read More

Listen With Your Eyes 2: Experimental Films for Families

20:50
Fri 06 Dec

ICA, Birkbeck Cinema & Barbican

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Film Undone – Elements of a Latent Cinema convenes artists, filmmakers, curators, researchers, and archivists to present and discuss unmade and unfinished film projects, film ideas realised in non-filmic media, as well as films that remained unseen in their intended form and at their intended time. An initial event in Berlin in 2023 and a book published in 2024 gathered tentative and careful pr... Read More

Film Undone – Elements of a Latent Cinema

Jun 3 —
Jun 3

Barbican Cinema

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Join us for this special presentation of two works delving into the realities of domestic workers' struggles. Read More

Antuca & Porque quería estudiar (María Barea)

May 3 —
May 22

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It took Heiny Srour six years to make Leila and the Wolves, a film that reveals a hidden past of women’s struggle in Palestine and Lebanon in an attempt to rewrite the history of the region from a feminist point of view. As John Akomfrah has written, Leila and the Wolves “weaves a rich tableau of history, folklore, myth and archival material.” The film is structured in a series of sketches, eac... Read More

Leila and the Wolves (40th Anniversary)

Nov 16 —
Nov 23

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From the 1950s onwards, the work of António Campos (1922-1999) took a unique path in Portuguese film history. He directed a series of documentaries and fiction films, experimenting with the conventions of film genres, working mostly on the margins of traditional modes of production. For years difficult to access and relegated to the fringes of Portuguese cinema history, his profoundly original ... Read More

The Films of António Campos

16:15
Sun 25 Jun

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The Non-Aligned Film Archives is an ongoing programme curated by researchers and archivists Léa Morin and Annabelle Aventurin in collaboration with Open City Documentary Festival. The project aims to create a space to share films that have been neglected and overlooked - important works, many of which have been recently restored, that have been marginalised from dominant cinematic narratives. E... Read More

Non-Aligned Film Archives 05: Tibelkachoutine (Mohamed Zinet)

15:00
Wed 28 Jun

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A panel discussion of the ins and outs of advocating for our access needs as professional artists: with panellists to be announced. Suggested donation of £4, but no one turned away for lack of funds! This public event follows an R&D period in which the co-op has sought out best practices for how institutions make space for access needs, with the aim to provide tools for cultural workers ... Read More

Access Riders: Now What?

May 18 —
May 25

ICA & Goethe-Institut London

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American filmmaker, cinematographer, photographer, visual anthropologist, and educator Skip Norman (aka Wilbert Reuben Norman Jr.) was born in Baltimore. In 1966—following five years in Germany and Denmark, where he developed an interest in acting and directing alongside his studies dedicated to the German language and literature—he was accepted into the inaugural cohort of students at Berlin’s... Read More

Skip Norman: Here and There

15:00
Sun 28 May

Close-Up Cinema

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With his first film Solitaire à micro ouvert (Open Mic Solitaire, 1983) and its follow-up Mélodie de brumes à Paris (Mist Melodies in Paris, 1985), the Afro-French filmmaker Julius-Amédée Laou delivered a stunning one-two salvo in the name of Black diasporic liberation. Featuring a brand-new restoration, Julius-Amédée Laou: Short, Sharp Shocks brings these unforgettable works together in the pr... Read More

Julius-Amédée Laou: Short, Sharp Shocks

18:15
Wed 03 May

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The Non-Aligned Film Archives is an ongoing project curated by researchers and archivists Léa Morin and Annabelle Aventurin in collaboration with Open City Documentary Film Festival. The project aims to create a space to share films that have been marginalised from dominant cinematic narratives. Each session revolves around a single lost work that is instead invoked through other films that hav... Read More

Non-Aligned Film Archives 04 : Unknown Suriname / Dja Dja Srnaam (LOSON)

18:40
Tue 28 Mar

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Lis Rhodes’ latest essay film Disquiet, made against the backdrop of the pandemic, continues her ongoing project of documenting and drawing attention to the progressive eradication of justice, equality and individual liberties as a consequence of neoliberal capitalism. Using still images, sound, text and her distinctive voice-over, Rhodes calls out the evils of globalisation whilst taking a tru... Read More

Disquiet

20:50
Tue 28 Mar

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The Non-Aligned Film Archives is an ongoing project curated by researchers and archivists Léa Morin and Annabelle Aventurin in collaboration with Open City Documentary Film Festival. The project aims to create a space to share films that have been marginalised from dominant cinematic narratives. Each session revolves around a single lost work that is instead invoked through other films that hav... Read More

Non-Aligned Film Archives 03 : Insurrectionnelle (Farouk Beloufa, 1972)

15:00
Sun 05 Feb

Close-Up Cinema

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The Non-Aligned Film Archives is an ongoing programme curated by researchers and archivists Léa Morin and Annabelle Aventurin in collaboration with Open City Documentary Film Festival. The project aims to create a space to share films that have been neglected and overlooked – important works, many of which have been recently restored, that have been marginalised from dominant cinematic narrativ... Read More

Non-Aligned Film Archives 02 : Regards Inversés (Med Hondo)

16:00
Sat 04 Feb

Ciné Lumière II

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With a career spanning over 60 years and some 140 films, from the iconic works of the New Wave to the cinema essays he became known for, Jean-Luc Godard, who passed away in September 2022, was the epitome of cinema. With this season, Ciné Lumière aims to offer a critical perspective to different periods of Godard’s filmmaking, with talks by prominent scholars and Godard specialists, to help ... Read More

Jean-Luc Godard: Perspectives

Dec 8 —
Dec 11

ICA & Birkbeck Cinema

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António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro together created one of the most influential bodies of work in the history of Portuguese cinema. Made between 1963 and 1989, their films deal with rural communities, rituals and landscapes, blending reality, fiction into a singular survey of the north-eastern Portuguese region of Trás-os-Montes. This retrospective offers a survey of their work, from Reis’s ea... Read More

Into Their Labours: The Films of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro

15:00
Sun 05 Jun

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To launch the fourth issue, Peculiar Forms, of Open City Documentary Festival’s Journal Non-fiction, artists and contributors, Morgan Quaintance and Diane Severin Nguyen, will join the editor of this issue, curator Aily Nash, for a screening and an extended conversation. Both artists will present new moving image works that speak to the formative years of teenage life as the burgeoning moment o... Read More

Teen Spirits

ICA & Birkbeck Cinema

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The films of Rosine Mbakam give voice to the stories of Cameroonian women at home and overseas, deconstructing cinema’s colonialist gaze on African women and girls. Her first three solo documentary features – The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman (2016), Chez Jolie Coiffure (2018) and Delphine’s Prayers (2021) – form an extraordinarily empathetic tryptic on the African migrant experience in Europe,... Read More

In Focus: Rosine Mbakam

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The Bartlett Screening Room is a series of events addressing questions around critical urbanism through the screening of short films and moving image, followed by discussion. It is a collaboration from Henrietta Williams, an artist/researcher based at The Bartlett School of Architecture, and Oliver Wright, programmer of Open City Documentary Festival. Read More

Programme 5, The Bartlett Screening Room (2022)

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The Bartlett Screening Room is a series of events addressing questions around critical urbanism through the screening of short films and moving image, followed by discussion. It is a collaboration from Henrietta Williams, an artist/researcher based at The Bartlett School of Architecture, and Oliver Wright, programmer of Open City Documentary Festival. Read More

Programme 4, The Bartlett Screening Room (2021/2022)

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The Bartlett Screening Room is a series of events addressing questions around critical urbanism through the screening of short films and moving image, followed by discussion. It is a collaboration from Henrietta Williams, an artist/researcher based at The Bartlett School of Architecture, and Oliver Wright, programmer of Open City Documentary Festival. Read More

Programme 3, The Bartlett Screening Room (2021)

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The Bartlett Screening Room is a series of events addressing questions around critical urbanism through the screening of short films and moving image, followed by discussion. It is a collaboration from Henrietta Williams, an artist/researcher based at The Bartlett School of Architecture, and Oliver Wright, programmer of Open City Documentary Festival. Read More

Programme 2, The Barlett Screening Room (2021)

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The Bartlett Screening Room is a series of events addressing questions around critical urbanism through the screening of short films and moving image, followed by discussion. It is a collaboration from Henrietta Williams, an artist/researcher based at The Bartlett School of Architecture, and Oliver Wright, programmer of Open City Documentary Festival. Read More

Programme 1, The Barlett Screening Room (2021)

19:00
Wed 27 May

Online, Vimeo Live

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A livestream screening of short works – part of a larger series called FRONTIERLAND curated by Pamela Cohn & Open City Documentary Festival Read More

FRONTIERLAND: SHORTS (Livestream + Q&A) (2020)

14:00
Fri 03 Apr

Birkbeck Cinema

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In 2017 the Essay Film Festival invited Jocelyne Saab to present her extraordinary trilogy of films about Beirut shot between 1976 and 1982. These are personal and political film essays in which the filmmaker tries to come to terms with her experience of the civil war in Lebanon. Initially a journalist and war reporter, Saab became a central figure in Arab cinema, documenting intrepidly the tra... Read More

Tribute to Jocelyne Saab (Postponed)

14:00
Sat 09 Nov

Goethe-Institut London

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Jürgen Böttcher: Martha + Helga Misselwitz: Who is Afraid of the Bogey Man? This programmme juxtaposes two documentary portraits of strong women - Jürgen Böttcher's Martha (1978) und Helke Misselwitz's Who is Afraid of the Bogey Man? (1989). What distinguishes these two women and their circumstances? What do they have in common? How do both directors approach and stage their subjects in thes... Read More

Jürgen Böttcher & Helke Misselwitz (2019)

20:30
Sat 07 Dec

Close-up Cinema

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A dazzling journey into immersive abstraction, Japanese artist-filmmaker Makino Takashi's Memento Stella is made up of hundreds of layers of footage, blending into dense fields of imagery complemented by a highly effective soundtrack by Reinier Van Houdt. “Memento Stella is an original phrase I coined to remind me to ‘never forget that we too reside among the stars,’ as well as the title of ... Read More

Memento Stella (2019)

14:00
Sat 05 Oct

Cruciform Lecture Theatre 2, UCL

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UCL Anthropology (Open City Docs) runs a leading practical MA programme in Ethnographic & Documentary Film at UCL, now in its fifth year. Run by leading film practitioners, students receive high-quality, practice-based learning within a top-level university research environment. This event features two of our finest student's graduation films, with filmmakers present for a Q&A with M... Read More

UCL It’s All Academic Festival: Windows on the World (2019)

20:30
Thu 27 Jun

Bertha DocHouse

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Amongst the first key works to emerge from the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep on the perilous journey into the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains of Montana for summer pasture. Read More

Sweetgrass + Joanna Pocock Q&A (2019)

19:30
Wed 12 Jun

Regent Street Cinema

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Filmed between 1989 and 1990, Böttcher’s impressionistic, painterly study traces the Berlin Wall in the days leading up to and during its destruction, as demolition machinery moves in and Berliners begin dismantling it by hand, chipping away at its edifice with small hammers and chisels. Focusing on iconic locations in the centre of Berlin such as the Potsdamer Platz, the Reichstag and the Bran... Read More

The Wall (Die Mauer) + Extended Intro (2019)

12:30
Sun 16 Jun

Rich Mix London

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A portrait of an artist on the brink of global fame, and the struggles he and those closest to him faced in balancing that with what mattered most to him - his own people. Read More

Gurrumul (2019)

18:30
Mon 03 Jun

Medical Sciences 131 A V Hill LT, UCL

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Open City Docs runs a leading practical MA programme in Ethnographic & Documentary Film at UCL, now in its fifth year. Run by leading film practitioners, students receive high-quality, practice-based learning within a top-level university research environment.This event will feature three graduation films made by the most recent cohort of students. Lucia Molina Pflaum’s Sisters Speak fol... Read More

UCL Festival of Culture: Windows On The World (2019)

12:00
Mon 03 Jun

1st Floor - Room 7, UCL South Wing

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UCL was the first university in the UK and one of the first in the world to start to teach immersive factual storytelling. In 2017, Open City Docs’ MA Ethnographic and Documentary Film launched ‘Studio 4: UCL 360’, led by a senior BBC immersive producer with a team of leading industry innovators, facilitating the creation of non-fiction Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality projects at UCL. The... Read More

UCL Festival of Culture: Immersive Stories (2019)

19:00
Tue 07 May

Kings College London (Strand Campus).

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Four Springs is a documentary film that presents a family’s daily life in the remote town in southern Guizhou. From a subjective angle, the camera introduces the flow of life out of the screen: the quotidian toils, singing, excursions in nature, visits among friends and extended families, funerals, reunions, and separation. It presents the state of being of the two main characters, the director... Read More

Four Springs (2019)

14:00
Fri 29 Mar

Birkbeck Cinema

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Harris brings disparate mediums into dialogue with one another, in order to present multiple perspectives highlighting experiences of the African diaspora. Read More

Christopher Harris – Speaking in Tongues (2019)

20:25
Thu 28 Mar

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a meditation on the vast landscape of ruins and vacant lots that constitute the north side of St. Louis, Missouri, an area populated almost exclusively by working-class and working poor African Americans. Read More

Christopher Harris – still/here (2019)

21:00
Thu 14 Mar

Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) Glasgow

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Glasgow Short Film Festival welcomes Colombian filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán, screening three works that combine multiple modes of storytelling to explore the spaces where documentary, anthropology and fiction intertwine. Read More

The Ethno-Fictions of Laura Huertas Millán + Q&A (2019)

16:00
Thu 17 Jan

The Horse Hospital

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Found footage filmmaking is as ubiquitous as ever, but as contemporary understandings of the archive shift in a digital age, where does the law figure? Is everything up for grabs? And just how do we gain access to these seemingly impenetrable archives, both physical and online? We interrogate the legality and ethics of making film with digital and analogue archive footage with its keepers and c... Read More

Masterclass: Finding (Found) Footage (2019)

20:30
Mon 05 Nov

Rich Mix London

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In 2015, demonstrations against Pierre Nkurunziza’s third term bring thousands to the streets of Bujumbura. As the violence gains ground many, including Eddy Munyaneza‘s own family, flee – but he picks up his camera. Eventually seeking refuge in Senegal, Munyaneza goes in search of his family, along the way encountering those who stayed and those who chose the path of exile. In partnershi... Read More

Uncertain Future (2018)

18:30
Mon 05 Nov

Rich Mix London

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Young boxer, Christ, trains relentlessly by day and works as a doorman in Libreville nightclubs at night. But Amédée Pacôme’s searching documentary debut always implies more than it reveals. Gabon’s impending presidential election is seemingly an incidental background, reported casually on radio and TV, although its outcome will deeply govern the lives of Christ and his love ones. In part... Read More

Boxing Libreville (2018)

Regent Street Cinema

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Ulrike Ottinger’s epic Chamisso’s Shadow - the latest film from one of Germany's most influential filmmakers and photographers - will be showing in three chapters over the course of a single weekend. Ottinger's work, rarely exhibited in the UK, explores the world through images notable for their curiosity about different human cultures and for their visual power and intensity. The film was i... Read More

Chamisso’s Shadow (2018)

20:15
Sun 25 Mar

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Susana de Sousa Dias’s Luz obscura – literally ‘obscure light’ – is a highly sensitive and beautifully crafted essay film about the lives of political prisoners during Portugal’s Salazar dictatorship (1926-1974), and the devastating effects this repression had on their children. Materially the film is constructed from two main sources: the photographs of the prisoners taken by the Portuguese... Read More

Obscure Light (2018)

20:30
Thu 29 Mar

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A graduate of Harun Farocki’s Art and Film Studio, Viennese filmmaker Johann Lurf has built a considerable reputation internationally, thanks to a succession of striking shorts in a structuralist vein that investigate film and space often through found-footage moving image. His first feature-length work is a scintillating, monumental development of this tendency, a brilliantly edited compila... Read More

★ (2018)

18:00
Sun 26 Mar

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BABETTE MANGOLTE / 2017 / UNITED STATES This second programme devoted to the work of Babette Mangolte focuses on her trilogy of films about landscape: There? Where?, The Sky on Location and Visible Cities. These essay films are both studies of specific locations and a sustained reflection about the art of landscape cinematography. The filmmaker describes the first film, There? Where?, as ... Read More

Babette Mangolte: Three Landscape Films (2017)

Jul 20 —
Jul 22

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BABETTE MANGOLTE / 2017 / UNITED STATES The first of two programmes devoted to the essay films of the great filmmaker, cinematographer and photographer Babette Mangolte, this session focuses on the act of looking through the camera, questioning the notion of “subjectivity”, the role of the spectator, and the relation between vision and power. The Camera: Je, or La Caméra: I is a self-por... Read More

Babette Mangolte: The Camera: Je, or La Caméra: I (2017)

Jul 20 —
Jul 22

Picturehouse Central

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‘Marianne Hertz: Model and Perfect Mother’. This is how filmmaker Tom Fassaert’s grandmother was presented in a 1950s magazine. His father, uncle and aunt smile awkwardly when he makes them read it out loud: their childhood was far from perfect. Her two sons ended up in a children’s home at a young age, and the relationship with their now 95-year-old mother remains troubled. Not long after his ... Read More

New European Cinema: A Family Affair (2017)

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We're delighted to host the UK Premiere of Ezra Edelman’s Oscar Shortlisted 7.5 hour epic, O.J: Made in America. Spend an entire day at the DocHouse at this unmissable one-off documentary event. It is the defining cultural tale of modern America - a saga of race, celebrity, media, violence, and the criminal justice system. And two decades after its unforgettable climax, it continues to fasci... Read More

O.J: Made in America (2016)

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This moving portrait gives an insightful glance into the daily life of a family of transgender women in India - the hijras, more commonly referred to as ‘the third gender’. The film paints a fascinating portrait of their history, mythology, rituals and place in contemporary Indian society, where they are revered in the country’s religious history yet ostracised by society and commonly rejected ... Read More

Guru, a Hijra Family (2016)

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Actor Kate Lyn Sheil is preparing to play the role of Christine Chubbuck, a Florida television host who committed suicide on live air in 1974. Filmmaker Robert Greene cleverly forgoes your standard talking-head-and-sound-bite approach to nonfiction storytelling, instead choosing to employ Sheil as a conduit to understanding an impossibly complex issue. Committed to doing justice to Christ... Read More

Kate Plays Christine (2016)

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The disappearance of the Aral Sea is one of the most disastrous human-caused catastrophes in world history. It was once among the four largest lakes on the planet covering an area of over 26,000 square miles, but decades of over reliance on its tributaries for agriculture has turned it into an arid wasteland. Sea Tomorrow takes us to this post-apocalyptic landscape where the sea is gone but ... Read More

Sea Tomorrow (2016)

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Communist Romania - 1980s. Culturally isolated, ideologically censored; all images of life outside the Iron Curtain are banned and TV is reduced to a couple of hours of propaganda bulletins each day. From the drab concrete housing blocks to the food ration queues, an overwhelming fear of state surveillance had prevented the people from stepping out of line. But there was one window into the fre... Read More

Chuck Norris vs. Communism (2015)

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ROUGH CUTS is an evening of documentary and non-fiction works-in-progress where independent filmmakers and audio doc-makers are invited to present their current projects and test out new work at various stages of completion. Open City Documentary Festival has provided a platform for established and emerging filmmakers since 2011 and to continue developing and nurturing new work and makers we... Read More

Rough Cuts (2015-2017)