London’s upcoming Open City Documentary Festival (September 6-12) will open this year with Miko Revereza’s Nowhere Near, a poetic essay film that traces the filmmaker’s decision to leave the United States and return to the Philippines, and will close with a joint screening of Margaret Tait’s last film Garden Pieces (1998) and artist and filmmaker Luke Fowler’s Being in a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait (2022). “Where Garden Pieces is a vibrant live-action and hand-drawn garden portrait, Fowler’s latest film is an unconventional biographical portrait of the late Scottish filmmaker and poet,” the festival writes.
“Festivals like Open City offer a bridge between the filmmakers and audiences of the past, the present and the future,” the festival further adds. “Being based at University College London, we conceive of the festival almost as an alternative “film school”, a space where we come together to watch, share, discuss non-fiction cinema in all its forms. A film festival should be an intense, out of the ordinary, experience of plenitude. Maintaining the accessible size and scope of Open City is a difficult balancing act: we want to remain small, privileging safety, intimacy, friendliness and respect, whilst allowing a space for abundance. To care for each and every single work presented at the festival and yet to know that opportunities to see these works remain unfortunately far too rare.”
Again in 2023, the festival celebrates the work of women filmmakers with two historical programmes, the festival underlines. No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image is dedicated to works of non-fiction that invent new languages for the representation of gendered experience. “Concentrating on the period of the 1970s to 1990s, it responds to the contemporary imperative to recover the breadth of women’s contributions to film history in a global context,” the festival writes. The Invisible Self is a programme of feminist films made between 1985-1991 that journeys through the lives of women who challenged traditional patriarchal structures in India.
“In Focus” programmes on Mary Helena Clark and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley constitute the first in-depth surveys of both artists’ work in the UK.
Familial connections, the importance of location as well as retracing ancestral and historical journeys are also prominent this edition. Annabelle Aventurin’s Le Roi n’est pas mon cousin (The King is Not My Cousin, 2022) chronicles her grandmother’s experience from Guadeloupe, a journey of resilience and sacrifice across the Atlantic. Rebecca Jane Arthur’s Hit Him on the Head with a Hard, Heavy Hammer takes her father’s handwritten memoir as a point of departure as she sets out to retrace his journey as a child evacuee during the Second World War. Screening alongside Arthur’s film, In a Nearby Field (Laida Lertxundi & Ren Ebel, 2023) follows a woman, a man and young child who live together in the Basque Country, hinting to the delicate balancing act of maintaining a family and a creative practice. Ava Vaz’s A árvore is a “ritual-film” about her father – the late artist, musician and mystic of the forest Guilherme Vaz.
Up the River with Acid (Harald Hutter, 2023) is a tender 16mm portrait of the filmmaker’s elderly parents as he documents his father’s onsetting dementia whilst portraying the kind of intimacy that comes with familial closeness. The World of Dementia + The Brightness of the Day is a programme curated by Ricardo Matos Cabo which also looks at the issue of care for the elderly from the distinct perspectives of Japanese documentary filmmakers Haneda Sumiko and Satō Makoto.
The Harvard Film Archive is collaborating with Open City on a number of programmes for the 2023 edition. Curated by Haden Guest, SMALL WORLDS. AVANT-GARDE DOCUMENTARIES FROM THE HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE “interweaves distinct yet complementary modes of avant-garde non-fiction cinema made by independent artists,” the festival writes. Haden Guest will also deliver the illustrated lecture Anne Charlotte Robertson and the Art of the Diary, “situating Robertson’s diaristic film practice within the longer history of the diary as an art form.”
Dóra Maurer’s rarely screened and newly digitised Hétpróba (Seven Trials, 1982) will show at Tate Modern, following an exhibition of her work in 2019-2021. Maurer employs a range of cinematic strategies in this intimate portrayal of an opera singer and her four teenage children.
The works and legacies of influential Black artists and writers Toni Morrison and James Baldwin are examined in Quiet As It’s Kept (Ja’Tovia Gary, 2023) and I Heard It Through the Grapevine (Dick Fontaine, 1982). Gary’s film is a contemporary cinematic response to The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s first novel, published in 1970. Fontaine’s portrait of James Baldwin, recently restored by Harvard Film Archive, documents the writer’s difficult return to key sites of the Civil Rights Movement.
Maryam Tafakory returns to the festival with Mast-del (2023) which continues the artist’s investigation into representations of women in post-revolutionary Iran. Jenny Brady’s Music for Solo Performer (2022) and Graeme Arnfield’s Home Invasion (2023) form a double bill of essayistic approaches to technological systems of control and care.
TALKS AND WORKSHOPS
Returning in 2023, Critics Workshop is an immersive programme for 10 selected participants developed with the Another Gaze editorial team to discuss the methodologies and practice of a politically engaged film criticism.
There will be a special event to mark the publication of Alia Syed: Imprints, Documents, Fiction. Published by Courtisane festival in collaboration with Open City Documentary Festival, the first monograph to be devoted to Syed’s work features new essays by Jemma Desai, Inga Fraser, Peter Gidal, Rahila Haque, Salima Hashmi, Anjana Janardhan, Ruth Noack and Henrietta Williams, as well as writing by Syed herself.
In connection with the exhibition And still, it remains by filmmaking duo Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah co-presented with LUX, a workshop on Working Collectively is an invitation by Other Cinemas to Black and non-white communities grappling with collaborative filmmaking.
Hosted by T A P E Collective, the talks Local: City & the Storytelling & Emerging / Established and No In-between respond to T A P E’s mission to demystify the film industry.
Other Talks and Workshops will include Cross-(r)evolutionary Sound Archives by Only Voice Remains, Collaborative Processes and Questions of Care, developed and hosted by Elhum Shakerifar, On Location: The Challenge and Opportunities Of Documenting Place, a panel presented in partnership with Alchemy Film & Arts, Artist Talks by Miko Revereza and Mary Helena Clark and the first session of Filmmaker meetups of London, hosted by artists Therese Henningsen and Morgan Quaintance.
EXPANDED REALITIES
Expanded Realities, the festival’s cross media (AR/VR/XR+) exhibition showcases storytelling at the intersection of art and technology. Alongside the aforementioned In Focus: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, there are a number of projects available to experience for free at the Festival Hub.
