Open City Documentary Festival

7 – 13 September 2022
in London

Year Round Activity

Current Events

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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

18:40, Tue 28 March ICA

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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)

20:50, Tue 28 March ICA

Past Events

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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)

15:00, Sun 05 February Close-Up Cinema

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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

16:00, Sat 04 February Ciné Lumière II

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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

Dec 8 — Dec 11 ICA & Birkbeck Cinema

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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

15:00, Sun 05 June LUX

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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

Apr 19 — Apr 23 ICA & Birkbeck Cinema

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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, curated by Henrietta Williams and Open City Documentary Festival. International short films and moving image artworks are screened for collective viewing online and followed by a conversation with the artists and/or filmmakers. Sessions are op... Read More

Programme 5, The Bartlett Screening Room (2022)

Jan 26 — Feb 23 Online, Zoom

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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, curated by Henrietta Williams and Open City Documentary Festival. International short films and moving image artworks are screened for collective viewing online and followed by a conversation with the artists and/or filmmakers. Sessions are op... Read More

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

Nov 3 — Jan 12 Online, Zoom

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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, curated by Henrietta Williams and Open City Documentary Festival. International short films and moving image artworks are screened for collective viewing online and followed by a conversation with the artists and/or filmmakers. Sessions are op... Read More

Programme 3, The Bartlett Screening Room (2021)

Apr 28 — May 12 Online, Zoom

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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, curated by Henrietta Williams and Open City Documentary Festival. International short films and moving image artworks are screened for collective viewing online and followed by a conversation with the artists and/or filmmakers. Sessions are op... Read More

Programme 2, The Barlett Screening Room (2021)

Feb 23 — Mar 23 Online, Zoom

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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, curated by Henrietta Williams and Open City Documentary Festival. International short films and moving image artworks are screened for collective viewing online and followed by a conversation with the artists and/or filmmakers. Sessions are op... Read More

Programme 1, The Barlett Screening Room (2021)

Jan 12 — Feb 9 Online, Zoom

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Join us for an online screening of a programme of short works, the first event in a planned larger series entitled FRONTIERLAND, curated by Pamela Cohn and Open City Documentary Festival. FRONTIERLAND is a multi-event film series that was due to take place during Summer 2020, but with cinemas closed, we currently cannot proceed as planned. With borders closed and people's movement across the... Read More

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

Wed 27 May Online, Vimeo Live

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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)

14:00-17:00, Fri 03 April Birkbeck Cinema

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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)

14:00, Sat 09 November Goethe-Institut London

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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)

20:30, Mon 07 December Close-up Cinema

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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)

14:00, Sat 05 October Cruciform Lecture Theatre 2, UCL

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Join writer Joanna Pocock for a screening of Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Sweetgrass, followed by a discussion of her new book, Surrender, a narrative nonfiction work on the changing landscape of the West, inspired by a two-year stay in Montana. Amongst the first key works to emerge from the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to le... Read More

Sweetgrass + Joanna Pocock Q&A (2019)

20:30, Thu 27 June Bertha DocHouse

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Filmed between 1989 and 1990, Böttcher’s impressionistic, painterly study traces the 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 Brandenburg... Read More

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

19:30, Wed 12 June Regent Street Cinema

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GURRUMUL is 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. Celebrated by audiences at home and abroad, Indigenous artist Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu was one of the most important and acclaimed voices to ever come out of Australia. Blind from birth, he found purpose and... Read More

Gurrumul (2019)

12.30, Sun 16 June Rich Mix London

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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)

18:30-20:00, Mon 03 June Medical Sciences 131 A V Hill LT, UCL

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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)

12:00-14:00, Mon 03 June 1st Floor - Room 7, UCL South Wing

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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)

19.00, Tue 07 May Kings College London (Strand Campus).

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Speaking in Tongues: a lecture-performance by Christopher Harris Throughout his career artist and filmmaker Christopher Harris has used film and video installations to re-stage and explore African American accounts of history. Using experimental film techniques, Harris brings disparate mediums into dialogue with one another, in order to present multiple perspectives highlighting experiences ... Read More

Christopher Harris – Speaking in Tongues (2019)

14:00, Fri 29 March Birkbeck Cinema

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Shot in 16mm black and white, still/here (2000) is 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. The film explores the vestiges of a once-thriving community through evocative imagery of derelict cinemas, fading billboards and abandoned do... Read More

Christopher Harris – still/here (2019)

20.25, Thu 28 March ICA London

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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. A triptych of rich and poignant portraits—all produced by Millán during a practice-based PhD between Beaux-Arts de Paris and Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab—deftly move betwe... Read More

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

21.00, Thu 14 March Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) Glasgow

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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)

16:00, Thu 17 January The Horse Hospital

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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)

20.30, Mon 05 November 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)

18:30, Mon 05 November Rich Mix London

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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)

Jul 20 — Jul 22 Regent Street Cinema

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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)

8.15pm, Sun 25 March ICA London

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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)

8.30pm, Thu 29 March ICA London

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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)

6pm, Mon 26 March ICA London

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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)

2.30pm, Sun 25 March Jul 20 — Jul 22 ICA London

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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)

18.30, Fri 15 February Jul 20 — Jul 22 Picturehouse Central

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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)

Jul 20 — Jul 22

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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)

Jul 20 — Jul 22

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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)

Jul 20 — Jul 22

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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)

18:30, Thu 29 March Jul 20 — Jul 22

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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)

Jul 20 — Jul 22

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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)