Open City Documentary Festival 2021 Programme Catalogue

08.09.21–14.09.21 in London 13.09.21–23.09.21 Online

The Art of Non-Fiction

Open City Documentary Festival

Partners & Sponsors

08.09.21–14.09.21 in London 13.09.21–23.09.21 Online

Open City Documentary Festival

The Art of Non-Fiction

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Open City Documentary Festival aspires to address the expanded field of non-fiction cinema, from artists’ moving image to documentary to expanded reality. In conceiving the festival as a discursive space, we seek to provoke dialogue, creation and research through the collective participation in screenings and events. We have worked collaboratively with many organisations and individuals to put together the programme this year: Alia Syed, Ana Vaz & Olivier Marboeuf, Another Gaze, BFMAF, CREAM, Ed Webb-Ingall, Elena Gorfinkel, Erika Balsom, Fireflies Press, Goethe-Institut, Hope Strickland, Lucy Parker, Luke Fowler, LUX, London Community Video Archive, Mimosa House, not/nowhere, Onyeka Igwe, Ricardo Matos Cabo – as well as our UCL colleagues at the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Slade School of Fine Art. We want to thank them all for their involvement.

Welcome to Open City Documentary Festival 2021!

About Open City Documentary Festival

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Opening & Closing Nights 12–16

In Focus: Alia Syed 17–26

In Focus: Renate Sami 27–37

Film Programme 38–85

Talks and Workshops 86-96

Expanded Realities 98–100

Tickets & Venues 101–102

Team & Thanks 103

Directory 104–107

Schedule 108–109 3

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Open City Documentary Festival creates an open space in London to nurture and champion the art of non-fiction cinema. Based at the UCL Centre for Public Anthropology, we deliver training programmes, an annual documentary festival, the bi-annual Non-Fiction journal and events throughout the year that aim to challenge and expand the idea of documentary in all its forms.

2021 Awards & Juries

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One ambition of a film festival should be to bring together the filmmakers of the past and present with those of the future. Our programme this year is a resolute attempt to resist the tyranny of the new, to reconnect with our desires, to consider what it means to be in the here and in the now. We will celebrate the work of three important women filmmakers – Renate Sami, Haneda Sumiko and Alia Syed – and we will finally have the chance to see, in the cinema, key works of 2020 that have not yet screened in London. Events organised with the London Community Video Archive and the Bartlett School of Architecture invite us to reconsider what it means to return to the city after lockdown and reclaim public spaces, such as the cinema. Several long-durational works heighten, and are heightened by, the communal viewing experience. Inquisitive, challenging, poetic – the festival continues to champion films that express themselves politically and aesthetically, that expand cinematic language and force us to look anew at the world. Cinema as a joyous experience, an experience of truth and ecstasy.

After a year of absences and sacrifices, we want to emphasize presence. This edition of the festival has been conceived with the non-fiction film community of London and across the UK in mind, considering our necessity to come together but also the importance of doing so gradually, and safely. We are mindful that many of our audience members will not yet be ready to come to the cinema or to travel to London, so for the first time the festival will take place in a hybrid form.

Whilst all the events are intended – at the time of writing – to take place in person, a fully captioned online viewing platform will make a selection of the festival programme accessible throughout the UK.

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As we worked towards the 2021 edition of the Open City Documentary Festival, exhausted by the experience of the past year and filled with the desire to inhabit the cinema space together again, we had to rethink the way we do things. After all, is it possible to keep doing things in the same way?

What is a festival and who is it for? Is it a selection of films or an encounter? A festival is more than the sum of its parts. As a presentation context a festival is the construction of a temporary and collective situation, an experience of itself.

Contents

CO N T E N T S

Cinema as Community, Cinema as a Tool of Justice, Cinema as Ecstasy

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2021 Awards Film Programme and Juries

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After the Crossing

Bicentenario

Joël Richmond Mathieu Akafou | 2020 | France, Burkina Faso, Belgium | 77’

Pablo Álvarez Mesa | 2020 | Colombia, Canada | 43’

From Where They Stood

Lost Course

Christophe Cognet | 2021 | France, Germany | 110’

Icarus (after Amelia)

Salome Jashi | 2021 | Switzerland, Germany, Georgia | 90’

The Invisible Mountain Ben Russell | 2021 | USA| 82’

Tatiana Mazú González | 2020 | Argentina | 82’

The Blue House Hamedine Kane | 2020 | Belgium, Senegal, Cameroon | 55’

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Taming the Garden

Shady River

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Margaret Salmon | 2021 | UK | 58’

Jill Li | 2021 | Hong Kong | 180’

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Emerging Filmmaker Award

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Open City Award

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Supported by the British Council

International Short Film Award

If I could name you

Onyeka Igwe | 2020 | UK | 19’

myself (I would hold you forever)

Boots on Ground Kiran Kaur Brar | 2021 | UK | 8’46’’

Pervading Animal

Luke Fowler | 2021 | UK | 12’

Graeme Arnfield | 2021 | UK | 31’

Future Foods

Piano Practice

Gerard Ortín Castellví | 2021

Maria Anastassiou | 2021 | UK | 8’

| Spain, UK | 21’

Korea | 7’

Figure Minus Fact

Notes, Imprints (On Love): Part I & Part II, Carmela Alexandra Cuesta | 2020 Ecuador, USA | 25’

Mary Helena Clark | 2020 | USA | 13’

To Pick a Flower Gorria (Red)

Shireen Seno | 2021 | Philippines | 17’

Maddi Barber | 2020 | Spain | 22’

Sol de Campinas Inner Outer Space

Jessica Sarah Rinland | 2021 |

Laida Lertxundi | 2021 | Spain | 16’

Brazil | 26’

Triforium

Letter From Your Far-Off Country

13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Jayne Parker | 2021 | UK | 7’

Suneil Sanzgiri | 2020 | USA | 17’

Ana Vaz | 2021 | Portugal | 31’

Surviving You, Always Morgan Quaintance | 2020 | UK | 18’

Simon Liu | 2020 | Hong Kong, UK | 13’

Jooyeon Lee | 2021 | Republic of

Hope Strickland | 2021 | UK | 8’

For Dan

Happy Valley

Back to Back

Rebecca Jane Arthur | 2020 | Belgium, UK | 37’

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a so-called archive

Anya Tsyrlina | 2020 | Switzerland, Russian Federation | 19’

Liberty: an ephemeral statute

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All Other Things Equal

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UK Short Film Award

Zero Length Spring 9

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Ross Meckfessel | 2020 | USA | 17’

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Hyun Jin Cho is a film curator based in London where she is Programmer for the BFI London Film Festival. She has previously worked for the London Korean Film Festival and Curzon Artificial Eye. Her recent curated projects have been presented at cultural institutions and film festivals such as Tate, ICA, REDCAT and Il Cinema Ritrovato. She is currently undertaking research on the intersection of colonial history and the culture of cinema.

Elena Gorfinkel is a film scholar and critic. She writes about independent, underground, experimental film, contemporary global cinema and artist’s films, and women’s film histories. She is the author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s (2017), and co-editor of the volumes Taking Place: Location & the Moving Image (2011) and Global Cinema Networks (2019). She is currently writing a book on cinemas of exhaustion (awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant) and a monograph about Barbara Loden’s Wanda. Her criticism appears in Sight & Sound, Art Monthly, Cinemascope, and other publications. She is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London.

Sonali Joshi is a curator, access specialist and subtitler, and Founder/ Director of Day for Night and Aperture: Asia & Pacific Film Festival. Her interests cover Asian cinema, Latin American cinema, and architecture and cinema. Sonali holds a PhD in Cinema Studies (University of Glasgow).

She founded Day for Night with the aim of enabling broader access to underrepresented areas of cinema through curatorial projects, specialist distribution and access (subtitling for the d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing and foreign languages; audio-description).

Lucy Parker is a filmmaker and educator. She was the recipient of the IDFA First Appearance prize in 2019 for her film Solidarity which premiered at Sheffield DocFest and in London at Open City. Solidarity is about the experiences of workers in the UK who were blacklisted alongside women who were tricked into intimate relationships with undercover police. She is currently participating in IDFA Project Space 2021 developing a film about the current Undercover Policing Inquiry. Her films are distributed by LUX, London.

Maeve Brennan is an artist and filmmaker based in London. She is the current Stanley Picker Fine Art Fellow (2019-22) and is participating in British Art Show 9 (2021-22). Solo exhibitions include Chisenhale Gallery, London; The Whitworth, University of Manchester; Spike Island, Bristol; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin; Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art in Turku, Finland; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria and OUTPOST, Norwich. Her films have been screened internationally at festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Sheffield DocFest and FILMADRID. Brennan was a fellow of Home Workspace Program, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2013-14) and was the recipient of the Jerwood/FVU Award 2018.

Qila Gill is a film programmer and producer. Currently the International Programmer at London Short Film Festival (LSFF) and part of the selection committee at Sheffield DocFest. Previously she programmed for London Film Festival (LFF) and Aesthetica Film Festival. She is a fellow at the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), a member of BGDM, POC2, an alumnus of IFFR Sessions, and runs Marginalia Pictures.

Dr Clive Nwonka is a Lecturer in Film and Literature at the University of York and incoming Lecturer in Film, Culture and Society at University College London. His work is interested in the relationship between film, Blackness and social space, Black film and literature and racial inequality in the UK film industry. He is the Co-editor of the book Black Film British Cinema II and the author of the forthcoming book Black Boys: The Aesthetics of British Urban Film.

Adam Pugh is a curator, writer and designer based in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he also works as Regional Director, NE Contemporary Visual Arts Network. He previously ran the artists’ moving image programme Projections at Tyneside Cinema. He contributes regularly to Art Monthly; and has taught, delivered talks and served on international juries for institutions and events worldwide.

Róisín Tapponi is a film curator, programmer and writer based in London. She is Founder of Habibi Collective, Founder CEO of Shasha Movies and Founder EIC of ART WORK Magazine. Tapponi has most recently curated moving image exhibition programmes at MoMA, MAAT Lisbon and Sharjah Art Foundation. She has delivered masterclasses at Locarno Film Festival and CPH:DOX; and has lectured on women’s essay film and decolonial archiving at Oxford University, UC Berkeley and more. Tapponi is a contributing writer at frieze; she has recently been awarded the WorldLeading PhD Scholarship in Art History hosted by St Andrews, and is contributing to the catalogue for this year’s Venice Biennale.

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Matthew Barrington is a researcher and curator based in London. He is currently working on his PhD at Birkbeck College, London which focuses on Slow Cinema. He is the Manager of the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image and a programmer for the Essay Film Festival and the London Korean Film Festival. In addition to these positions he is a curator of cinema at the Barbican Centre.

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The Jury UK Short Film Award & International Short Film Award

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The Jury Open City Award & Emerging Filmmaker Award

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Opening & Film Programme Closing Nights

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Country UK Duration 58’ Format Digital

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Available Online

Director Laida Lertxundi Year 2021 Country Spain Duration 16’ Format 35mm Available Online

Laida Lertxundi’s first film since relocating to Spain from California in 2019 is a triptych composed of three independent and yet interrelated pieces – Teatrillo, Inner Outer Space and Under the Nothing Night. A new setting for the filmmaker but the same sun-drenched blue sky and sea.

Like all of Lertxundi’s work, Inner Outer Space is a film about relationships – between characters, between characters and landscape, between image and sound – but also, and ultimately, a deconstruction of the production process that highlights materiality and artifice. Just like the blindfolded woman in the film who attempts to orientate herself in a new geography, Lerxtundi is learning – through the making of a film – to reacquaint herself with the landscape of her native Basque Country. The concluding chapter – in which two young women perform a mysterious choreography to the projected images of waves – is an outburst of pure feeling.

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Year 2021

Filmed during the extended lockdown period – between March 2020 and May 2021 – in and around Govan, Glasgow, Icarus (after Amelia) is a quasi-anthropological study of female labour in contemporary Britain. Against the backdrop of a pandemic which has exacerbated gender inequality, Margaret Salmon uses feminist economic theory to draw attention to gender disparities in waged and unpaid labour – and more broadly to the gendered bias of traditional economic principles. Salmon’s 35mm film portraits of a range of settings including a dentist’s practice, a food bank, a hairdresser’s, a playground, and homes combine the rigour of sociological observation and the intimacy of a closeness to her subjects and subject matter. Inhabited by the spirit of Amelia Earhart, the film is punctuated with images of flight. On its dreamy soundtrack we hear Tracyanne Campbell and Donna Maciocia sing “We are going to make it in a man’s world,” almost like a mantra.

Inner Outer Space

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Icarus (after Amelia) Director Margaret Salmon

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Opening Night

Wed 8th September, Curzon Soho, 18.30

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In partnership with Instituto Cervantes London

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TEN SKIES

Country United States Duration 101’ Format 16mm

To celebrate the launch of Erika Balsom’s Ten Skies (Fireflies Press), a rare screening of James Benning’s homonymous 16mm film. This is a work to be experienced communally in the cinema after a year of cinema closures.

“In 2004, James Benning made a 16mm sound film of great simplicity: ten 10-minute static takes of the sky. TEN SKIES. How many films can be described so succinctly? It rivals early Warhol. The title says it all. When I first saw the film, it felt like a punch of clean rigour. It was literal, obvious and empty in the best way, an elemental experience of pure vision appealing to the beauty of structure, photochemical film and the natural world. […] As time passed, I realised there was so much I had missed in my initial encounter with Benning’s celestial images.”

—(Erika Balsom)

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Year 2004

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Closing Night

Tue 14th September, ICA, 18.30

In 2021, independent publishing house Fireflies Press launched a new series, the Decadent Editions: 10 books about 10 films, one for every year of the 2000s. Written by some of today’s most compelling cultural critics, each book is a deep dive into a single film. The presentation of Erika Balsom’s Ten Skies is accompanied by a day-long event on the practice of writing about cinema on Monday 13th September.

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With an introduction by Erika Balsom. In partnership with Fireflies Press

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Born in 1964 in Swansea, Alia Syed grew up in Glasgow and now lives in London. Her films have been shown at international institutions such as LACMA, the Moscow Biennale, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Hayward Gallery, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, INIVA, WKV Stuttgart and the Yale Center for British Art. This retrospective is the first comprehensive survey of her work in the UK. It provides an overview of four decades of moving image practice, from early student films such as Swan (Syed’s degree piece at the University of East London) and Fatima’s Letter (made whilst at the Slade) to the festival premiere of her recent video work Snow (2019). The retrospective is accompanied by an exhibition at Mimosa House of Syed’s Meta Incognita.

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Alia Syed made her early 16mm films at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative in the mid-1980s, using the Co-op’s optical printer as a means to explore issues of identity and representation. Her work investigates the nature and role of language in intercultural communication, with a focus on borders and boundaries, translation and the trans-cultured self. Syed’s films draw from personal and historical realities in order to address the subjective relationship to gender, location, diaspora and colonialism.

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In Focus: Alia Syed

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Fatima’s Letter

Unfolding depicts the gendered space of the launderette as both a site of oppression and possible resistance. “I was interested in making a film about women’s workspaces; the launderette is a functional space, but it is also a place where women meet socially. I got to know the women, took my Bolex (a wind-up camera), and after a while I felt comfortable enough to start filming. It made me aware of the way in which documentaries can be a form of control.

On the one hand, it was a straightforward documentary and, on the other, it questioned my role as maker. It took a long time to make and was extremely rigorous.” (Alia Syed)

A personal documentary around journeys, memories and watching: a woman remembers her past by faces she sees while travelling on the London Underground. She begins to believe that these people, like her, have all taken part in the same event. The story, which takes the form of a letter to her friend Fatima, is spoken in Urdu with subtitles in English, although the subtitles do not always appear in conjunction with what is spoken. Syed expresses the dislocation of the diasporic experience while questioning the role of language in structuring power relations between class, race and gender.

Alia Syed | 1986 | UK | 15’ | 16mm

Alia Syed | 1992 | UK | 20’ | 16mm

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Unfolding

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In Focus: Alia Syed 1

Eating Grass

Thu 9th September ICA, 20.45 Swan

Alia Syed | 1987 | UK | 5’ | 16mm

Filmed in Karachi, Lahore, and London, Eating Grass comprises five overlapping narratives, each representing different emotional states experienced throughout the day that are marked by the Muslim tradition of the five daily prayers.

Invested in a material reflection on language and translation, memory and displacement, Syed’s haptic cinema emphasizes the tactility of 16mm film. Layering of voices and layering of images produce a hypnotic effect in this meditative and sensuous work.

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Alia Syed | 2003 | UK | 23’ | 16mm

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A white swan prepares for flight, flexing and caressing, extending and folding its wings repeatedly as if bracing for a long journey. The close-up images of the swan are de-contextualised via repetition and framing; abstracting the natural form until it becomes a blank screen, onto which the viewer can project their own meaning.

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Alia Syed | 2014 | UK | 16’ | Digital

“The objects and places we cannot leave behind create the tapestry that is Points of Departure. Exploring themes of personal and collective memory through my relationship to the city of Glasgow, a voice over describes a tablecloth I retrieved whilst clearing my elderly father’s house. The film attempts to unravel the threads of memory held within this mundane item and to find an image within the BBC archive that relates to my memories of growing up in Glasgow.” (Alia Syed)

Priya

Alia Syed | 2012 | UK | 12’ | 16mm Priya is an extended aerial shot of a twirling Kathak dancer. The 16mm footage was buried in various organic materials, deteriorating the initial image to shift cultural specificity and linear narratives of time and space. Rituals of burial expound successive memories of entombment; the skin of the film becomes the body of the dancer, fracturing time into a darkly evocative, psychological space.

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Points of Departure

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Alia Syed | 2019 | UK | 42’ | Digital “This tape is made from Hi8 video that my father shot.” Through visual analysis and hypnotic repetition, Syed reappropriates footage shot by her father on a snowy day in the winter of 1995/96, at a time when the filmmaker and her father were not speaking to one another. Snow blends different temporalities – of the original footage, of the filmmaker’s first watching in 2017 and her subsequent viewings in 2019 – time and repetition shifting the filmmaker’s assumptions about the images and her late father, who is both present and absent.

Sun 12th September Genesis Cinema, 17.40

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Snow

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In Focus: Alia Syed 2

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Meta Incognita

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In Focus: Alia Syed 3

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Wallpaper

Alia Syed | 2010 | UK | 66’ | Digital

Wallpaper is a performative documentary in which four generations of women in the artist’s family attempt to recreate a wallpaper design that was painted by Syed’s grandmother when the artist was a child. It features Syed, her daughter, mother, and grandmother, as well as her sister, artist-filmmaker Tanya Syed.

Documenting the process in video and 16mm film, the five women take turns in the film’s technical roles (performer, director, camera operator), thus de-stabilizing the relationship between filmmaker and filmed subject, and the traditional generational hierarchy. The result is a self-reflexive and delicately layered film which deals with family, memory and subjectivity.

Meta Incognita was included in the exhibition Migrating Worlds: The Art of Moving Image in Britain in 2019 at the Yale Center for British Art and is presented for the first time in London.

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Mon 13th September Genesis Cinema, 18.15

Meta Incognita: Missive II is the second part of a triptych of films that utilises different histories while focusing upon recognisable locations along and within the River Thames: from Millbank Prison (now the site of Tate Britain) to Second World War architecture on the Essex coastline.

Linking places as far flung as the Canadian Northwest Passage and a cellular prison in the Andaman Islands, the three Missives create an extended narrative recited by the female captain of a ship returning to the Thames from the Canadian Arctic. Meta Incognita: Missive II is based on the exploits of the Elizabethan privateer turned explorer Martin Frobisher, who repeatedly sailed to the Canadian Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage. Set in a future where global warming has opened the Northwest Passage to heavy/commercial/transcontinental cargo trade, the narrative follows a renegade ship’s captain who has undertaken a commission to smuggle the last remnants of an unspecified natural resource. The film consists of two shots, sunset and sunrise, filmed off the Essex coast at the mouth of the Thames, on a Public Right of Way called the Broomway, which was until the 1930s the only way onto Foulness Island from the mainland.

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Wed 1st–Sat 11th September (except Sun 5th) Mimosa House, 12.00–18.00

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An essay by Rebecca Jane Arthur

While I know Syed’s work to be alive with sound, even original compositions, I am drawn to two of her surviving student films, both silent. I’m seized by the insights they provide into her filmic beginnings, her visual language. The muted, black-and-white creature in Swan (1987), one of her first films, is captured bracing for flight, writhing and amplifying its force with the strokes of its wings, like winding up a Bolex ready to shoot. Its plumage is tangible. In contrast to the swan’s serene, object-like beauty, Syed films the energy underlying the animal, capturing its prowess and sensuality, its elegance and power. The images repeat, loop, and enchant. In Durga (1985), I watch the rise and fall of an impregnated belly, the home of the womb. In silent observation, the breath is heard through the light that echoes outwards from the dark concave hollow of the navel. A hand casts a white sheet into the air. It tumbles, floats, and tumbles again, downwards, in the middle of a spiral staircase. Folding in on itself, unfolding, unravelling, falling. Tumbling. Turning. Twisting.

Twirling. And repeat. The textile is tactile. It’s translucent, captured on black-and-white filmstock. Shadows appear. Images overlap. Until the film’s black becomes white – exposed.

Turning backwards, I uncover that Syed’s first-ever student works are lost. Still, until found. Looking forwards, the imagery, symbolism, and hypnotic rhythms in montage from her early works return to me in the films that ensued through gestures, movements, structures, surprises, counterpoints. Each film is unique in subject and sound, but part of a thread: the red thread that weaves in and out of one’s life, tying it all – heritage, language, culture, politics, faith, pain, pleasure, creation, stagnation, reflection, success, failure, love, loss – together. An elaborate weave of multiple strands of identity, memory, and meaning. Attention is in the detail. Syed’s films aren’t just beautiful; they destabilise you, sending you into a spin. Often, she captures landscapes and cityscapes that fold in on you, making you feel small: a busy marketplace, train station, or road junction – each with their own set of rules. One has the sensation, time and again, that one must beware of being folded away, beware of constrictions. And when things become too loud, heavy, or oppressive, a narrator in Eating Grass (2003) shares the key to regaining a sense of autonomy: take up twirling, as “it makes us light.”

In Focus: Film Programme Renate Sami

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Watching Alia Syed’s films, spun over four decades from the mid-1980s till today, motifs appear and reappear, haunting the screen. Images and sounds layer and double before me. Literary references intertwine – poetry, allegories, myths, rhymes, song. Directions are sounded by a familiar accent, reminding me of home: “She turns, looks to camera. Cut.” Syed’s Glaswegian lilt warms her material: sculpting and welding together many of her pieces. The voice, her voice or a voice, whispers, confides, insists, and plays in a language known to me and in another unknown – tongues, layered, lapping – one over the other.

Translations and intertitles wave in and out of sync with sound. Repetition and onomatopoeia draw me inwards to meet the characters of her dialogues – “tuck, tuck: children playing.” Even the silent films speak.

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“As things have become loud again, we have taken up twirling – it makes us light.”

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Twirling

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Sami was moved into becoming a filmmaker aged forty following the death of Holger Meins, the subject of her first film. Later subjects include the work of writers and painters, her films proposing an imaginary dialogue with those of fellow filmmakers such as Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Harun Farocki and Ute Aurand, with whom Sami co-founded “FilmSamstag” (Film Saturday), a monthly film programme at Kino Filmkunsthaus Babylon Mitte that ran from 1997 to 2007. This In Focus programme is the first survey of her work in the UK.

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Renate Sami (Berlin, 1935) is a filmmaker and translator whose work resists narrow categorisations. Her films are extremely diverse in form and content, oscillating between the poetic, the observational and the political. As Ute Aurand writes, “Since her first film in 1975, each and every one of her works has emerged from the same strong desire to make this particular film. Whether long or short films, shot on 16 mm, Mini DV or HD, without sound or without dialogue or music – what they all have in common is the special inner freedom with which Renate Sami gives every film its form.”

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In Focus: Renate Sami

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With thanks to the Deutsche Kinemathek

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In collaboration with the Goethe-Institut

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Thu 9th September Goethe-Institut, 18.30

Fri 10th September Ciné Lumière – Institut Français, 18.15

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Oskar Langenfeld. 12 Mal Holger Meins | 1966 | Germany | 12’ | 16mm

Hooray for Mrs. E (Hurra für Frau E.)

Renate Sami | 1975 | Germany | 60’ | 16mm

“Holger Meins started studying film in 1964. When he was arrested in 1970, he was working as a cameraman on diverse projects and had made a twenty-minute film on a homeless man that was highly esteemed by his fellow students. After leaving jail he became seriously engaged in the protest movement against the war in Vietnam and was again arrested in 1972. He was accused of being a terrorist and died in prison while on a hunger strike in 1974. He was thirty-three. In my film I interview some fellow students, a friend who lived with him for a while, a young woman who was part of a student group. Holger Meins and a fellow student were working on a film project aimed at helping the young ones articulate their problems and translate them into film.” (Renate Sami)

From the Cloud to the Resistance (Dalla nube alla resistenza)

Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub | 1979 | France, Italy | 104’ | Digital From the Cloud to the Resistance (Dalla nube alla resistenza) is a two-part film about time, myth and resistance based on two works by Italian writer Cesare Pavese. The first part features six conversations from Pavese’s 1947 Dialogues with Leucò, which is composed of imagined dialogues between ancient Greek figures. The dialogues take place in the Piedmontese landscape and concern the relationship between God and humans, the nature of sacrifice and the abuse of power. The second part of the film is set in the present and based on Pavese’s The Moon and the Bonfires (1950), in which an emigrant returns to his native village after the Second World War in search of traces of the life he once knew, only to be confronted by loss, violence, and stories of resistance.

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We All Die, The Main Thing However is How and How We Live Our Lives. Holger Meins (Es stirbt allerdings ein jeder Frage ist nur wie und wie du gelebt hast. Holger Meins)

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Günter Peter Straschek | 1967 | Germany | 7’ | 16mm

Cesare Pavese Turin – Santo Stefano Belbo Renate Sami & Petra Seeger | 1985 | Germany | 60’ | 16mm

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“Cesare Pavese was born in 1908 in Santo Stefano Belbo, a small town in the mountains between Turin and Genoa. He lived and worked in Turin, where he committed suicide in 1950.

He was forty-two. These two places also play a part in his last two novels—Turin in Tra donne sole and Santo Stefano Belbo in La luna e i falò—and so we will walk through these two places, arriving at the station just like the main characters in both novels. There are two interviews—one with Massimo Mila, a writer and Pavese’s friend in Turin, the other with Pinolo Scaglione, a carpenter and cooper and his friend from childhood in Santo Stefano Belbo.”

(Renate Sami)

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Renate Sami | 1995 | Germany | 4’ | 16mm

Fri 10th September Goethe-Institut, 20.30 The Protection Foil (Die Schutzfolie) Renate Sami | 1983 | Germany | 8’ | 16mm

“Under the spell of Cathy Berberian’s voice, scraps of melodies and poems in my head in love with spring and summer’s flowers I walked through streets and gardens, pastures, fields and forests and by the end of that summer 1995 I had a little film which ends somewhat melancholically with some chords of Gustav Mahler’s ‘Traveling Journeyman’s Songs’.” (Renate Sami)

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when you see a rose (wenn du eine rose siehst)

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“This film was produced to be included in a compilation of films against the construction of atomic bombs and nuclear power plants. Some trees and bushes, a clearing. A young man tries to wrap himself in a foil, and a girl who sings about love accompanies herself on a children’s bandoneon.” (Renate Sami)

The Journey to Cairo (Die Fahrt nach Kairo) Renate Sami | 1990 | Germany | 60’ | Digital

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Renate Sami | 1990 | Germany | 93’ | 16mm

“I could say Mit Pyramiden is a film about Egypt. About Cairo, about the people there, the streets, the history of the country, the sounds, the light, about the colours, the religions, the sand, the pyramids. I see and I hear.

Cars honking, cars standing around everywhere, people in long clothes, including men. Renate Sami shows me everything as if I were seeing it for the first time. I’m the one discovering life in the images. I follow her traces in the other culture. I hear that I hear and I see that I see. Nothing is covered up with words or music.

Life shows itself. It is as if a veil were continuously falling. It is like a cleansing of the senses. My intellect wakes up. The explosions of editing do this. Things collide that I would not have suspected. They generate a new space outside the film. The pleasure of the unexpected wonder between the images gives the film an energy all its own.” (Ute Aurand)

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With Pyramids (Mit Pyramiden)

“The Journey to Cairo contains something of the marvel that the cinematograph enabled, the marvel of discovery, the marvel of time machines, the marvel of being able to travel around the world while seated in a chair. The marvel of the cinematograph is today nearly buried by the many stories wanting to generate tension for the sake of a thrill and in whose service it seems more and more to waste itself.

But like every marvel, it contains this one hidden away somewhere and ready to appear on request. The Journey to Cairo is an approach to a city, to a city in a foreign country.” (Maria Lang)

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An informal afternoon programme looking at friendship, affinities, portraits and journals in Sami’s work – with screenings, readings and discussions with friends and collaborators of Renate Sami.

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Sun 12th September Goethe-Institut, 13.30

Sat 11th September Goethe-Institut, 14.00

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In Focus: Renate Sami 4

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In Focus: Renate Sami 3

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Renate Sami | 2005 | Germany | 32’ | Digital

“Several portraits of friends, women and men, the Polish Market on Potsdamer Platz, the Wall, a picnic in the Park, on the road in Italy, Turin in Winter, a poem by Cesare Pavese. The film was originally shot on Super8, was then transmitted to MiniDV and left without sound to be punctuated here and there with some short pieces of music.” (Renate Sami)

A Year (Ein Jahr)

Renate Sami | 2011 | Germany | 12’ | Digital “A tree seen through the window of my kitchen.

And behind the tree a wall, the stucco old and falling in pieces, leaving strange abstract forms and designs that changed with the light according to the time of day and season. [...] The film is constructed like a poem. What would be the end of a line in a poem is here marked by 24 frames of black leader separating one, two or a cluster of images to give it a rhythmic structure.”

(Renate Sami)

On The Lake (Am Lietzensee)

Renate Sami | 2013 | Germany | 12’ | Digital Renate Sami observes spring, summer, autumn and winter from a bench, using a small HD camera to film the time from summer 2012 to May 2013.

A Beginning An essay by Renate Sami

I had my first direct contact with film in 1969 when I moved into a shared apartment with two film students: Ulrike Edschmid and Philip (Werner) Sauber. I was working as a teacher and translator. The student movement was in full swing and when I think back to that time today, it is a big clutter of people and experiences, demonstrations, teach-ins, and Kommune 1 happenings. I think of slogans, movie titles, sayings: “Create two, three, many Vietnams” from Che Guevara, who had been killed a year earlier, Mao Tse Tung’s “A revolution is not doing embroidery,” Bob Dylan’s “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” Godard’s Weekend, La Chinoise, and One Plus One with the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.”

Back then, the apartment on Grunewaldstrasse was always full of people constantly coming and going.

Sometimes someone spent the night or came in the middle of the night and disappeared again the next morning, or stayed for weeks, like Holger Meins, who was particularly fond of the Straubs’ films. At the time, Holger had just finished Oskar Langenfeld, which the Straubs must have really liked because when he died, they added the dedication “For Holger Meins” to their film Moses and Aaron. Philip Sauber had also just completed his film Der einsame Wanderer (The Lonely Wanderer) and both he and Holger were expelled with a group of other students because they had occupied the offices of the film school’s director. The cause was that, on the instructions of the Senator of the Interior, Günter Peter Straschek’s film Ein Western für den SDS (A Western for the SDS) had not been approved. Our kitchen became a centre for discussions about how things should proceed. Harun Farocki lived two floors up, Hartmut Bitomsky was often around, and everyone was making small films that were shown at the teach-ins and student gatherings like anti-newsreels.

We would often go to the movies and talked a lot about films. Bresson, Godard, Rossellini, the Straubs, Renoir, and Buñuel, but also Sergio Corbucci’s Il Mercenario (The Mercenary), which deals with the resistance of Mexican miners, were studied and discussed. Films were supposed to be enlightening and the form was important too. New wine shouldn’t fill old wineskins. A big surprise was Straub and Huillet’s Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach). A year after Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt, wo Gewalt herrscht (Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules), at the end of which an old woman shoots at a Nazi, they were presenting a film in which the main thing to watch was musicians at work. Bach’s music, a few scenes from his life, places where he had been employed, some pieces of handwriting, notes, and people playing music again and again.

Holger had shot a small film showing how to make a Molotov cocktail. The police were looking for him and shortly thereafter he disappeared in the underground. Soon after that Philip said goodbye to me and disappeared too. One year later, Holger was arrested along with Andreas Baader and Jan Carl Raspe and died during a hunger strike in prison in 1974. Philip died a year later during a shoot-out with the police. There is a book about him by Ulrike Edschmid, Das Verschwinden des Philip S. (The Disappearance of Philip S.). And with the film Es stirbt allerdings ein jeder, Frage ist nur wie und wie du gelebt hast. Holger Meins (We All Die, The Main Thing However is How and How We Live our Lives. Holger Meins), I became a filmmaker.

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A short portrait of the filmmaker by friend and collaborator Ute Aurand.

Filmdiaries 1975 – 1985 (Wanderings) (Filmtagebuch 1975 – 1985 (Streifzüge))

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Ute Aurand | 2021 | Germany | 6’ | 16mm

I N FO CU S: R E N AT E SAMI

RENATE

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Film Programme

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Thu 9th September Ciné Lumière – Institut Français, 18.15

Thu 9th September Curzon Soho, 18.15

Year 2021 Country Belgium, Cameroon Duration 90’ Format Digital

Director Christophe Cognet Year 2021 Country France, Germany Duration 110’ Format Digital

From Where They Stood is a meticulous investigation into a rare set of clandestine photographs taken by prisoners in concentration and extermination camps during the Second World War. Director Christophe Cognet travels to Dachau, Mittelbau-Dora, Buchenwald, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbrück to locate the exact position from which each image was captured, working alongside camp historians to methodically reconstruct the conditions at the moment at which they were taken. Placing translucent glass prints of the original photographs over the camera lens, Cognet transposes the past to the present as previously hidden details are recalled to the surface of each image. From Where They Stood is a rigorous archaeological study that delicately unearths the stories behind these astonishing photographs, and the courageous men and women who took them.

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Available Online

The latest film by acclaimed filmmaker Rosine Mbakam is a portrait of Delphine, a young Cameroonian woman now living in Belgium. Over the course of several interview sessions, Delphine describes a life full of tragedy, trauma and loss beginning with the death of her mother during childbirth and her own childhood experiences of sexual abuse and exploitation. Filmed entirely within the confines of a small Brussels apartment, Mbakam’s patient, steady camera remains fixed on Delphine with only an occasional doorbell or distant street sound a reminder of the world outside the frame. Throughout her career Mbakam has found spaces where African women are able to be and to speak and – in this apartment – Delphine tells her own painful story with spirit, courage and wit.

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Director Rosine Mbakam

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From Where They Stood (À pas aveugles)

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Delphine’s Prayers (Les prières de Delphine)

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Thu 9th September Bertha DocHouse, 18.20

Thu 9th September ICA, 18.30

Year 2020 Country Argentina Duration 82’ Format Digital

Director Miko Revereza & Carolina Fusilier Year 2021 Country Mexico Duration 70’ Format Digital

The Still Side is an ambiguous, sensorial spatial study that draws upon multiple mythologies in its exploration of a forgotten pleasure island off the coast of Mexico. ‘Capaluco’ was once a thriving resort popular with holidaymakers and passing cruise ships, but it now stands abandoned and empty. Filmed amongst the remains of theme parks, fabricated Greek ruins and deserted beach hotels, Revereza and Fusilier’s digital images present the desolate landscape like an architectural render. The voices of disembodied tour guides are interspersed with intimately recorded, speculative conversations between the artists as they reflect on a mysterious sea creature, sweeping from the Philippines to Mexico, and imagine the possible past and future inhabitants of this strange, forgotten landscape.

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Available Online

Río Turbio (Shady River) is the name of the coal town in the Argentinian Patagonia where the filmmaker hails from.

Local superstitions have traditionally forbidden women from entering the mines; according to legend, the earth would become jealous and that would lead to the collapse of excavations and certain death. Women were initially brought to Shady River by force and have remained trapped there in the passive roles of spouses and daughters, their place in the mine limited to that of being visitors to the local mining museum or participants in a beauty pageant.

Unable to enter the mine herself to film it, Mazú constructs an oblique portrait of the female experience of coal country through archive footage, geological maps, landscape shots, photographs and text message exchanges with her aunt – a local campaigner who was once crowned Miss Coal. Shady River is a complexly layered essay film that deconstructs the mine as a gendered territory and gives a voice to the untold stories of women living in towns of men.

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Director Tatiana Mazú González

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The Still Side (El lado quieto)

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Shady River (Río Turbio)

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Sol de Campinas + Bicentenario

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A Story, a Battle and An Excuse: Presented by The London Community Video Archive

Fri 10th September Bertha DocHouse, 18.20

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Three films from the 1970s that tell the stories of local communities, in Notting Hill, Kentish Town and Beckford, who advocate for new play sites by campaigning and protesting. The Amazing Story of Talacre (1974) produced by Inter-action, features Kentish Town locals fighting against Camden council. Their aim is to clear an empty site in their neighbourhood and create a safe play site, where artistic events can stimulate community activity. The Battle for Powis Square (1973) shows Notting Hill residents pressuring the council to revamp the overgrown and underused gardens, which could easily serve as play sites. Again, the locals voice their anger and disappointment with the lack of action shown by the council. The screening will end with All You Need’s an Excuse (1972) by Liberation Films, which features the story of Beckford residents campaigning for a new playground, where children can safely spend their free time while adults socialize. This 10-minute film represents the need for these areas to not only benefit the children, but also older members of the community, who lack opportunities to make new friends and interact with one another.

These films show the perspective of local communities taking matters into their own hands and their interest in their surroundings, with the expectation to be heard and understood. No matter the time or place, these themes continue to resonate.

In partnership with LCVA

Pablo Álvarez Mesa | 2021 | Colombia, Canada | 43’ | Digital | Available Online Invoking the spirit of Simón Bolívar, Bicentenario is an essayistic travelogue that sets out to critique and complicate his legacy. This is done through a careful and specific retracing of his liberation journey at a moment when villages and towns across Colombia are celebrating the 200-year anniversary of the War of Independence of 1819. Shot on 16mm, the camera focuses upon scenes of parades, marching bands and military reenactments, resting upon monuments that offer up nationalistic statues and slogans that celebrate Bolívar, the liberator. Synthesised to this historical journey is a violent and traumatic event from Colombia’s recent past – the Siege of the Palace of Justice – in which the State stormed the country’s supreme court after the building was taken over by members of the guerrilla group, M-19. Using this event to bookend the film, Pablo Álvarez Mesa reflects on a doctrine of nationalistic fervour and violence that remains tied to the symbol of Bolívar throughout Colombia.

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Organised by Victoria Gogolinski, BA Film and Screen Studies at London College of Communication

Bicentenario

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Thu 9th September Genesis Cinema, 18.40

Sol de Campinas observes a team of archaeologists as they excavate a ring of mounds within a territory currently known as the State of Acre, Brazil. They have been working at the site for the past ten years and are trying to uncover artifacts from an indigenous people who once occupied the land. Jessica Sarah Rinland examines the processes of excavation through detailed 16mm images of the archaeologists at work. Moving between the field and the lab, Rinland constructs an intimate study of the site today whilst an image of its history also starts to emerge.

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Sol de Campinas

Jessica Sarah Rinland | 2021 | Brazil | 26’ | Digital | Available Online

FILM PROGRAMME

Fri 10th September ICA, 20.00

OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

Fri 10th September Curzon Soho, 18.30

Year 2021 Country Switzerland, Germany, Georgia Duration 90’

Director Luis López Carrasco

In partnership with the Embassy of Switzerland in the UK and the British Georgian Society

Available Online

Year 2020 Country Spain, Switzerland Duration 200’ Format Digital

Shot entirely on Hi8 videotape in a bar in Cartagena, The Year of Discovery is a monumental work which excavates the legacy of 1992, proposing a counter-narrative to the official history of the year that Spain hosted the Olympics in Barcelona, the universal exposition Expo’92 in Sevilla, and celebrated the quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. This landmark year is considered by many to be the moment when Spain officially entered into a modern neoliberal age, when the country consolidated a new international image as a democracy and moved away from a past associated with underdevelopment, Franco’s regime and stereotypical folklore. In Carrasco’s home region of Murcia, the new economic policies of the early 1990s were met with riots that razed the parliament building in Cartagena, a forgotten episode of national and local history which locals recall in the film. The Year of Discovery was hailed as one of the most important film works of 2020 and finally gets its first London cinema screening at the festival.

In collaboration with the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, where The Year of Discovery screened online in 2020. In partnership with the Embassy of Switzerland in the UK and the Instituto Cervantes London

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Format Digital

Taming the Garden opens with a strikingly surreal image: that of a giant tree, planted in a raft of soil, floating across the Black Sea. Salome Jashi’s observational film charts one powerful man’s bizarre project to uproot and transplant hundreds of mature trees from the forests of rural Georgia to his own private garden. The film documents this brutal process of extraction as one-by-one the towering trees are pulled from the earth and transported to the palatial home of their new owner – a former Georgian Prime minister – as locals look on in horror and bemusement. Jashi captures the strange and terrible spectacle with a patient, forensic eye to construct a modern-day fable of wealth, power and privilege.

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Director Salome Jashi

OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

The Year of Discovery (El año del descubrimiento)

FILM PROGRAMME

Taming the Garden (მოთვინიერება)

Suneil Sanzgiri | 2020 | USA | 17’| Digital | Available Online

Incorporating a range of digital and analogue material including video newsreel, 3D maps of Kashmir’s mountains and on-screen text message exchanges with the filmmaker’s father – all rendered onto expired 16mm film stock – Sanzgiri’s film essay searches for solidarity in the sounds and colours of the spontaneous Muslim women-led Shaheen Bagh movement in Delhi, the song of Iqbal Bano, the theatre of Safdar Hashmi, and images of B. R. Ambedkar – the radical anti-caste Dalit intellectual and founder of the Indian constitution.

Centred around letters written to a distant relative, Sanzgiri traces lines and lineages of ancestral memory, poetry, history, songs, and ruins from his birth in 1989.

FILM PROGRAMME

Boots on Ground is an autobiographical account of a second-generation British South Asian woman’s experiences with the police, racism and violence in London. Presented in splitscreen, mobile phone footage captured during protests in the summer of 2019 show the legs and feet of police officers patrolling the area around Buckingham Palace and The Houses of Parliament in indiscernible formations. Kiran Kaur Brar’s spoken narration describes a disturbing personal chronology of police violence and racial discrimination, beginning in her childhood in the 1980s and eventually converging with the day of filming.

This video essay centres around the formation of Kolambugan, a lumber town established by an American businessman in the Philippines, and that takes its name from the tree species which grows prominently in the surrounding area.

Shireen Seno incorporates archival photographs from the American Colonial Era (1898-1946) to explore the roots and growth of photography and capitalism in the Philippines. “There’s a tension to image-making that makes it so interesting – to keep moments of life with you, but in doing so, perhaps you also take something away from them. As a friend once said to me, it’s kind of like picking a flower: it’s beautiful and you want to take it, but you’re killing it at the same time. The camera enables us to straddle that fine line between life and death.” (Shireen Seno)

If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever)

a so-called archive

Hope Strickland | 2021 | UK | 8’ | Digital | Available Online

“Cotton is a plant with connotations that far surpass its delicate white flowers, bringing to mind issues of enforced labour, of exploitation, and of colonialism. Yet the very crop, for which creole women were forced into labour, offered a form of herbal resistance: cotton root bark could be used as birth control. Herbal knowledge, carefully gathered and held, was used amongst the women to defy a lineage of servitude. Beneath the inherent violence of the slave economic system, we find quiet resistance and moments of deep, loving rebellion. If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever) is in memoriam of this legacy.” (Hope Strickland)

Shireen Seno | 2021 | Philippines | 17’ | Digital | Available Online

Onyeka Igwe | 2020 | UK | 19’ | Digital Onyeka Igwe’s a so-called archive combines footage shot within the former sites of the Nigerian Film Unit (1932–1955) on Ikoyi Road, Lagos and The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (2002-2009) in Bristol Temple Meads. Igwe considers the visual and material residue of Empire, incorporating distinctive soundscapes, choral arrangements, a museum tour guide, and a radio play to imagine films that have been “lost” from both of these colonial archives.

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Letter From Your Far-Off Country

To Pick a Flower

Kiran Kaur Brar | 2021 | UK | 8.46’ | Digital | Available Online

THE ART OF NON-FICTION

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Fri 10th September Genesis Cinema, 20.45

Boots on Ground

OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

This combined programme includes recent work by Kiran Kaur Brar, Onyeka Igwe, Suneil Sanzgiri, Shireen Seno, Hope Strickland.

FILM PROGRAMME

Combined Programme 1

FILM PROGRAMME OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

Slade 150: recent moving image from the Slade

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Sat 11th September Ciné Lumière – Institut Français, 14.00

This autumn, the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, celebrates 150 years of fine art teaching and research with a varied programme of events which reflect on the past, showcase the present, and look ahead to the future. This programme of films presents some of the outstanding work made by recent Slade graduates during their studies.

OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

FILM PROGRAMME

FILM PROGRAMME

All Other Things Equal + There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse

All Other Things Equal

Anya Tsyrlina | 2020 | Switzerland, Russian Federation | 19’ | Digital | Available Online A found footage documentary in which material taken from late-Soviet propaganda films about gender equality is reconstructed to imagine a world populated entirely by women. The film depicts women performing an increasingly broad range of roles from the mundane to the extraordinary. Farmers, telecommunications experts, cosmonauts and biological scientists all appear in Tsyrlina’s elliptical montage.

Nicolás Zukerfeld | 2020 | Argentina | 63’ | Digital | Available Online

There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse is an idiosyncratic investigation into a curious quote on the nature of cinema, attributed to the great Hollywood auteur Raoul Walsh – beginning with an extended montage of moments from Walsh’s vast oeuvre in which the director’s leading men mount horses, or walk into rooms, over and over in rhythmic repetition. In the second chapter, a professor – heard in voice-over – describes his obsessive search for the origins of this obscure quotation. Illustrated with scribbled clues and scanned archival evidence unearthed during his laborious research, There Are Not ThirtySix Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse is a distinctive work of filmmaking-as-criticism.

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In partnership with the Embassy of Switzerland in the UK

There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse (No existen treinta y seis maneras de mostrar cómo un hombre se sube a un caballo)

THE ART OF NON-FICTION

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Sat 11th September Genesis Cinema, 15.30

Gerard Ortín Castellví | 2021 | Spain, UK | 21’ | Digital | Available Online “Food out of Thin Air.” Future Foods centres around a recorded telephone conversation in which the CEO of a Finnish Food Tech company discusses a new protein product developed through a cutting-edge process of microbe fermentation. Produced from water, electricity and air, “Solein” is the world’s most sustainable protein and is not limited by land availability or the use of animals, agriculture and aquaculture. The interview unfolds over images collected within the workshop of a UK prop manufacturer that observe – from beginning to end – the production process of fake meat made for film and television: from moulding and casting to hand painting the skin of a plastic cooked chicken. Continuing his exploration of the intersections between technology, industry and ecology, Ortín’s film presents a strange and troubling vision for the food of tomorrow.

Graeme Arnfield | 2021 | UK | 31’ | Digital | Available Online Graeme Arnfield’s kaleidoscopic essay film revolves around the story of Dr. Joseph Popp, an evolutionary biologist and architect of one of the earliest known examples of ransomware. In 1989, Dr. Popp distributed 20,000 floppy disks containing what would come to be known as the digital AIDS virus – a malevolent trojan horse that scrambled the contents of the victims’ computers and offered to unlock them only in return for a “licensing fee.” Working with a range of digitally manipulated found footage, Arnfield explores the legacy of Popp’s virus drawing surprising connections to the US invasion of Panama, the construction of a butterfly conservatory in New York and the aesthetics of computational art.

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Future Foods

OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

Pervading Animal Sat 11th September Curzon Soho, 16.00

THE ART OF NON-FICTION

Jooyeon Lee | 2021 | Republic of Korea | 7’ | Digital | Available Online Filmed during lockdown, Back to Back is a performance film about care centred around a phone conversation between a cleaning agency employee and a woman trying to empty a locked fridge. When the two women meet-up they engage in a strange dance through the streets of Seoul, locked together back-to-back in a movement of mutual support and dependence.

OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

FILM PROGRAMME

This combined programme includes recent work by Graeme Arnfield, Jooyeon Lee, Gerard Ortín Castellví.

Back to Back

FILM PROGRAMME

Combined Programme 2

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In partnership with the Institut Ramon Llull

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Soul in a White Room + Just A Movement

Just a Movement (Juste un mouvement)

Vincent Meessen | 2021 | Belgium, France | 111’ | Digital | Available Online

Soul in a White Room Simon Hartog | 1968 | UK | 3’ | Digital

The film begins with a pair of female hands stroking the back of a man wearing a white jumper. A second shot reveals the woman’s bare bottom being caressed by the man’s hands. The man is Omar Blondin Diop, briefly in London to participate in Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, alongside Frankie Dymon and members of the British Black Panthers. During this period, Diop also associated with LFMC figures such as Simon Hartog and David Larcher and wrote a text on Andy Warhol for the Co-op’s journal Cinim.

A hybrid essay film that attempts to draw a portrait of the Senegalese activist and intellectual Omar Blondin Diop, who died in unexplained circumstances in the prison of Gorée off the coast of Senegal in 1973. Diop had been one of the leaders of the student protests in Paris in May 1968 and appeared in Godard’s La Chinoise in the role of the Maoist instructor. His life and death have remained a potent symbol of the revolutionary struggle in Africa. Meessen takes La Chinoise (also screened at this year’s festival) as a point of departure and as a methodology to build a complex, multi-layered work from witness accounts, re-enactments, archival documents and contemporary footage. Blending documentary and fictional strategies in order to place Diop’s legacy into perspective, Just a Movement radicalises Godard’s idea of “a film in the making.”

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Sat 11th September Ciné Lumière – Institut Français, 18.00

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In partnership with Wallonia-Brussels International

Triforium

Jayne Parker | 2021 | UK | 7’ | Digital | Available Online

Zero Length Spring

Sat 11th September Genesis Cinema, 18.05 Gorria (Red)

Maddi Barber | 2020 | Spain | 22’ | 16mm | Available Online

“Night, like mourning, remakes space through absence: forms at the threshold of perception heighten sound and touch. When someone dies there is a pull towards the concrete and tangible, but disbelief creates a world of unreliable objects. Figure Minus Fact draws and redraws coordinates between spaces, senses, and objects, groping in the dark, desiring to see something that’s not there. Spaces become evidentiary yet deceptive in a subject-less portrait of loss.” (Mary Helena Clark)

Happy Valley

Simon Liu | 2020 | Hong Kong, UK | 13’ | Digital | Available Online “British Colonial-era structures overlook scenes in the aftermath of civil unrest as Hong Kongers work to retain some semblance of normality.

The sound of petty arguments from local TVB soap-operas of the 1980s are put in concert with captive animals, political graffiti and desolate highways. Suspension cables and ship anchor lines reveal a fragile urban anatomy; the structures that keep the city moving along.

As civic functions grind to a halt, the limits of our empathy and control come into question.”

(Simon Liu)

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Gorria adds a new chapter to Maddi Barber’s long-term project of documenting the environment around her native village of Lakabe on the slopes of the Navarrese Pyrenees. An observational study of traditional shepherding and sheep farming practices in the customary style of anthropological documentary, Gorria opens with the slaughtering of a lamb. Barber’s camera focuses on hand gestures – hands that, as the filmmaker notes, “feed, milk, stroke, shear, film; hands that kill. Hands which inhabit the doubts and contradictions about using other species.”

A mysterious, sensory collage depicting occult and paranormal activities. Zero Length Spring revolves around a reiki healing ritual interspersed with found photographs and original 16mm material referencing alternately pagan and (folk) horror imagery. Slyly connecting elements and artefacts of esoterica with references to the more cynical modern healing and faith industries, Ross Meckfessel creates a film that seems intended as a kind of incantation.

Going deep into the materiality of film – light pierces through cracks in black leader – film itself becomes a metaphor for the brain of the hypnotised spectator.

Mary Helena Clark | 2020 | USA | 13’ | Digital | Available Online

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Ross Meckfessel | 2020 | USA | 17’ | Digital | Available Online

Figure Minus Fact

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Images of Westminster Abbey’s triforium – a gallery hidden from view for centuries that runs sixteen metres high above the floor of the nave – are contrasted with those of magnolias that blossom for only a few days, plants which Parker films year after year. Permanence and transience; life and death. Laurence Crane’s musical accompaniment fills with feeling the quietude of the sacred space. The film is dedicated to the memory of the late teacher and writer A. L. Rees, who passed away in 2014.

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This combined programme includes recent work by Maddi Barber, Mary Helena Clark, Simon Liu, Ross Meckfessel, Jayne Parker.

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Combined Programme 3

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Inside the Red Brick Wall (理大圍城)

Sat 11th September Curzon Soho, 18.20

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Director Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers Year 2020 Country Hong Kong Duration 88’

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Filmed by an anonymous collective known as Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers, Inside the Red Brick Wall is a powerfully immediate account of the November 2019 ProDemocracy Protest at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Barricaded within the campus walls, the protestors fought for 13 days in an armed and increasingly violent conflict with riot police surrounding and laying siege to the university. With camera operators located across the campus, the often-shocking events are captured from all angles in a protest film that is as cine-literate as it is politically urgent. Between the brutal exchanges, fraught discussions amongst the demonstrators reveal the strategies, apparatus and mechanisms of protest in the digital age as live streaming, social media and, of course, digital filmmaking technology itself are utilised to organise and communicate.

COURTISANE FESTIVAL NOTES ON CINEMA — 20TH EDITION — 20 > 24 OCTOBER 2021 SPHINX CINEMA, MIRY, PADDENHOEK, KASKCINEMA - GHENT BELGIUM WWW.COURTISANE.BE

Image: Serpent River by Sandra Lahire. Courtesy of LUX and Cinenova, London

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The first film directed by Haneda Sumiko for Iwanami Productions depicts the efforts of women in a small village to overcome their conventional lives, while struggling with their daily toil, worrying about how to care for their households.

The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms (Usuzumi no sakura - 薄墨の桜) Haneda Sumiko | 1977 | Japan | 43’ | 16mm

Haneda’s first independent film, a project she honed over several years, is a paean to a millenary cherry tree that can be found in the Neo village in the Gifu prefecture. The film deals with the history of this magnificent tree, the changing social life of the community living around it and the filmmaker’s memories. As Haneda wrote, this personal film became an act of self-discovery, both a gesture of celebration and mourning, which allowed her to find a new path in filmmaking.

Sat 11th September ICA, 18.30 This screening celebrates the work of Haneda Sumiko, one of the most prominent documentary filmmakers from Japan and one of the few women working in non-fiction cinema there in the postwar period. Born in 1926, in Dalian, China (then Manchuria, under Japanese occupation), in 1949 Haneda entered Iwanami Productions, a company producing educational and promotional films, where she would make films about the arts, education, and nature, including A Women’s College in the Village (1958), Ancient Beauty (1958), or The Cabbage Butterflies (1968). In 1976 she directed her first independent film, The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms, a personal project she had worked on for many years. Haneda led a prolific career and directed over 80 short and long films. In addition, she founded her own production company Jiyu Kubo with her husband Kudo Mitsuru and published books about her filmmaking. She made films about folkloric dances and changing rural traditions (Ode to Mt. Hayachine, 1982), portraits of aging artists such as Akiko-Portrait of a Dancer (1985) or the monumental Kabuki Actor Kataoke Nizaimon (1992-1996). Haneda received widespread recognition for her films about welfare politics and caring for the elderly. Other work she did deals with the legacies and histories of feminism in Japan, with films about pioneer women in labour unions, and about the life of writer and peace activist Hiratsuka Raicho. Later in her career, Haneda reflected upon her early life in China with films about the Japanese settlers in Manchuria such as Faraway Home – Lushun and Dalian (2011). She also participated in the creation of the Tokyo International Women’s Film Festival (1985-2012), the first of its kind in Japan.

“Trees are animate in Japanese culture, and Haneda treats the object of her research as the main hero and an independent creature, while social life, natural landscape, poetry, and intimate impressions are built around it. Everything is interconnected in this film—the voice over with the discourse on imminent changes, the languid pace of landscapes changing in different seasons, people caught by camera, thoughts on sorrowful loss and memories. It provides an authentic view of the lost traditional and leisurely Japan before the technological and consumer boom. People in this country truly feel their connection to the earth they live in and poetry they have composed about their motherland for many centuries.” (Unattributed, adapted from garagemca.org)

This screening is held in partnership with the Japan Foundation.

It is part of the symposium Japanese Documentary Filmmaker Haneda Sumiko. Authorship and Gender Discourses (part II) taking place online on the 10th of September. The symposium brings together scholars discussing the work of Haneda, including a keynote presentation by Dr. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano and a lecture on The Cherry Tree and Eco-thinking by Dr. Anne McKnight. For more detailed information: www.soas.ac.uk/jrc

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Haneda Sumiko | 1957 | Japan | 25’ | digital

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The symposium is held in partnership with the Japan Research Centre (SOAS), Birkbeck School of the Arts, BIMI (Birkbeck Institute for Moving Image), the Japan Foundation, Meiji Gakuin University, and supported by the Great Britain SASAKAWA Foundation.

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A Women’s College in the Village (Machi no fujin gakkyu - 村の婦人学級)

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Tribute to Haneda Sumiko

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Sat 11th September Genesis Cinema, 20.30

Sat 11th September ICA, 20.45

OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

The Invisible Mountain

Year 2021 Country UK Duration 72’ Format Digital Available Online

Songs for the River began as a document of informal singalongs organised by the filmmaker’s neighbours in the communal spaces of their housing co-operative during the first lockdown of 2020. This is an intimate snapshot of Londoners coming together as a community – the residents of Brandrams Wharf Housing, a converted warehouse by the Thames River in Rotherhithe, range from NHS frontline workers to schoolteachers, probation officers, tradespeople, gardeners, artists. As seasons changed and the UK moved into further lockdowns in the autumn and winter, Ginsborg continued filming her neighbours, charting their experiences, both personal and political, of the pandemic. Her film is a powerful tribute to the power of solidarity and mutual care – and a reminder of the urgency of addressing the political responsibility of the pandemic from the perspective of the people.

Director Ben Russell Year 2021 Country USA Duration 83’ Format Digital

The Invisible Mountain is a hallucinatory travelogue based on Mount Analogue, René Daumal’s avant-garde novel which describes an expedition to the summit of a mountain, floating in an ocean, which cannot be seen, only deduced. Russell follows an unnamed traveller who journeys from Finland to Greece in search of a similarly unreachable mountain. His elliptical quest leads him to an Estonian lakeside, a secluded beach, and to numerous encounters with a touring group of musicians whose immersive performances include the extended psych-tinged interpretation of “Come as You Are” that opens the film. Equal parts non-fiction cinema, concert film, road movie and spirit quest, The Invisible Mountain is a heady inquiry into the transcendent possibilities of cinema.

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Director Charlotte Ginsborg

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Songs for the River

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OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

FILM PROGRAMME

La Chinoise

Sun 12th September ICA, 12.00

Year 2020 Country USA, Sweden, Japan, UK Duration 480’ Format Digital

A unique opportunity to see one of the most anticipated films of 2020, now finally screening in the UK. The immersive durational experience of a long-form work such as The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) not only requires the in-person conditions of being in the cinema, but also emphasizes the communal viewing experience. This eight-hour epic was shot over a fourteen-month period in a small, rural community in the Shiotani Basin, a short train ride from Kyoto. It is the second collaboration of C.W. Winter and Anders Edström, following on from their acclaimed debut The Anchorage. “It is a geographic look at the work and non-work of a farmer. A description, over five seasons, of a family, of a terrain, of a sound space, and of a passage of time. A georgic in five books.” (Winter and Edström). “More than a film to watch, The Works and Days is a film that engulfs you.” (Erika Balsom)

Director Jean-Luc Godard Year 1967 Country France Duration 100’

Godard’s brilliant dialectical farce, distinctly disquieting as well as gratingly funny, in which five Parisian students, members of a Maoist cell, discuss the implications of the Chinese cultural revolution, stands as a prophetic and remarkably acute analysis of the impulse behind the events of May 68.

It is also the point of departure of Vincent Meessen’s brilliant Just a Movement (also screening at the festival) a free-take on Godard’s film and a contemporary meditation on the relationship between politics, justice and memory.

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The Works and Days is a single film with a 480-minute (8-hour) run time. The film will be shown in its entirety with three intermissions: two 15-minute pauses at 1/4 and 3/4 of the way through the film and a longer intermission halfway through. This makes for a total viewing experience of approximately 9 1/2 hours.

In partnership with the Embassy of Sweden in London.

Sat 12th September, 14.00 Wed 15th September, 18.20 Ciné Lumière – Institut Français

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Director C.W. Winter & Anders Edström

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The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)

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FILM PROGRAMME

Lost Course (迷航)

Sun 12th September Curzon Soho, 14.00

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Director Jill Li Year 2019 Country Hong Kong Duration 180’

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In this epic work of observational, investigative filmmaking, first-time documentarian Jill Li embedded herself in the village of Wukan, southern China for several years to document an unprecedented experiment in local democracy. When Wukan residents uncover the illegal sale of communal land by local administrators, they begin an exhaustive and impassioned grassroots campaign to reverse the land sales and remove the corrupt officials from office, eventually gaining control over their local territory. However, their idealism and faith in the collective begins to fade as the newly elected village government finds itself mired in the same kind of corrupt dealings they had originally condemned. With extraordinary access, Jill Li intimately and compassionately observes an ensemble cast of characters as they struggle to maintain their course against the pervasive influence of corruption.

FILM PROGRAMME

Ana Vaz | 2020 | Brazil | 9’ | Digital | Available Online “Pseudosphynx is the scientific name of the fire-caterpillars soon to become butterflies, or as they’re commonly (and auspiciously) called: witches. These butterfly-witches are associated with several myths, one of which narrates that, during the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, it was believed that ‘witches turned into butterflies, a sort of transformism of living beings – real or imagined.’ Pseudosphynx, thus, is at the same time sphinx, meaning inhuman chthonic monstrosity that spells charades; and pseudo, as in artificial, insincere, deceptive, unreal, illusive, mimetic. Pseudosphynx keeps its meaning veiled, like a secret kept by those who save in their retinas the haptic impression of their fight.” (Ana Vaz)

Apiyemiyekî?

OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

The films of Brazilian artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz propose a critical reflection on the relationship between colonialism, modernity and the impending ecological disaster. Hers is haptic cinema that destabilises and questions the hierarchical gaze of ethnographic cinema, highlighting the instability of perspective as well as the presences before and behind the camera. This survey of recent works focuses on ideas of memory, the archive and critical pedagogy.

Pseudosphynx

FILM PROGRAMME

Recent Works by Ana Vaz

Sun 12th September Genesis Cinema, 15.20 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (13 Maneiras de Olhar para um Pássaro Negro) Ana Vaz | 2021 | Portugal | 31’ | Digital | Available Online

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13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird takes its title from the homonymous poem by Wallace Stevens, which also gives the film its structure. It was developed in collaboration with high school students Vera Amaral and Mário Neto over the course of a year, in the context of a workshop that deconstructed the process of making a film. We hear the students reading and interpreting the text, debating the project with the filmmaker, interrogating what cinema can be. “The film is a song you can see,” they write, opening up a reflection on the gaze; a central concern in the work of Ana Vaz.

A highly sensorial and audiovisually inventive film that rethinks its own form to find ways to enliven a precarious and largely unwritten history. Apiyemiyekî? takes as its starting point the archive of Brazilian educator and Indigenous rights militant Egydio Schwade, which contains over 3000 drawings made by the WaimiriAtroari, a people native to the Brazilian Amazon, during their first literacy process. The drawings are animated onto a landscape haunted by a violence, shedding light on the genocidal crimes committed against the indigenous communities during Brazil’s military dictatorship.

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Ana Vaz | 2019 | Brazil | 28’ | Digital | Available Online

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The Blue House + The House is Yet to Be Built

The Blue House (La maison bleue)

Hamedine Kane | 2020 | Belgium, Senegal, Cameroon | 55’ | Digital | Available Online Senegalese-Mauritian filmmaker Hamedine Kane’s The Blue House is an intimately observed portrait of Alpha, a charismatic artist living and working in exile in the Calais Jungle. Alpha transformed his self-built cabin into a living artwork: an evolving sculpture made from water bottles, plastic chairs and cassette tapes discarded around the camp. “The Blue House on The Hill” soon attracts the attention of the international art world as dealers and gallerists travel to the Jungle in increasing numbers, in the hope of acquiring it for exhibition. Amidst the rising clamour, Alpha and Kane share stories of their homeland and continue to make their art – the sculpture and film together constituting a shared space for poetic expression and resistance.

The House is Yet to Be Built (A casa, a verdadeira e a seguinte, ainda está por fazer)

Sílvia das Fadas | 2018 | Portugal, Austria, USA | 35’ | 16mm Sílvia das Fadas traces a journey between five sites of revolutionary outsider architecture: an ideal palace built by a postman after each of his daily rounds; a red house designed by a socialist agitator; a pacifist tower erected against the movements of History; an exuberant garden engendered in the feminine; and a merry cemetery, which conjures a community of equals in the outskirts of Europe. A travelogue to places which defy the surface of the world.

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Sun 12th September Bertha DocHouse, 18.00

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In partnership with Wallonia-Brussels International

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Sun 12th September Ciné Lumière – Institut Français, 20.00

A portrait of Juchitepec – an abandoned agricultural community – and its inhabitants, who struggle to survive in extreme poverty conditions. Gámez listens to those who have nothing in this short film which recalls the poetic universe of Juan Rulfo’s work.

The Secret Formula (La fórmula secreta)

Rubén Gámez | 1965 | Mexico | 42’ | 35mm The Secret Formula is a surrealist cinematic essay exploring the myths of Mexican national identity in a frenzied, anarchic collage. A string of murderous sausages, a cow morphing into human form, a dying man injected with Coca-Cola; Gámez employs brutal editing techniques to construct a torrent of symbolic, hallucinatory imagery in which symbols of capitalism, economic colonialism and Mexican mainstream cinema are evoked and subverted.

The film was awarded the main prize at the First Experimental Film Contest in Mexico City – an event intended to challenge the outdated structures and production models that dominated the national cinema of the time – and would go on to play a pivotal and influential role in the development of Mexican experimental cinema.

In his first film work in 1962, the short film Magueyes, Gámez explores an allegory of the Mexican revolution through the most iconic plant of the Mexican cultural imaginary, the maguey. Unlike Eisenstein and other authors who spoke on this subject, Gámez decides not to take a side in the struggle and although he makes his magueys fight through visual experimentation, the battle is that of nature.

The central film of his cinematographic work is La fórmula secreta (the original title was Kokakola en la sangre), an experimental short film in which, accompanied by the text of Juan Rulfo* and the voice of Jaime Sabines, he produced a searing critique of Mexican society that earned him first prize in the 1965 Experimental Film Contest. Organised by the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Producción Cinematográfica, the contest, although short-lived, opened up the possibilities of experimentation within Mexican cinema.

In 1974 he made the film Los murmullos, situated once more within the imaginary of Rulfo, in which we approach the inhabitants of the town of Juchitepec, their way of speaking and expressing themselves, their hands, the faces of a country that was not seen on the screens.

Undoubtedly, Gámez’s cinema proposed another way of making films and deconstructed the production models inherited from North America that, until this point, had shaped Mexican cinema. Although his work may have been little known at the time, it is a fundamental part of what was intended to be an avant-garde cinema and an important influence for future filmmakers.

The use of elements of national identity is present in all his works: tequila, magueys, the Mexican countryside. All these elements shape and run through Gámez’s films, even his unfinished works such as his film on Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas. In the words of Gámez: “My aim is to really create a Mexican cinema, the Mexican cinema of Rulfo. I believe that Mexican cinema should have its own experience, just as his painting does.” And yet, nothing is so far removed from the national identity and the official narratives of Mexicanness as his way of making films. Always in search of a visual and formal experimentation, a cinematic exploration that sought nothing more than to have its own voice, that sought to discomfort, but with images that remain in those who pass through his frames, that place us close to Rulfo’s literature, between life and death. *Writer, screenwriter and photographer Juan Rulfo was one of the most important authors of the 20th century for Latin American literature, with works such as Pedro Páramo and El llano en llamas. His work, situated between the reality of the post-revolutionary Mexican countryside and fantasy, was a turning point for later narrative experimentation throughout Latin America.

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In partnership with IMCINE – Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía

Rubén Gámez (1928-2002) was a Mexican film director born in 1928 in Cananea, who began working in the world of advertising and became one of the cult figures in Mexican cinema. With only a few films, he achieved an expressive and experimental power that few filmmakers have achieved in Mexican cinema.

His filmography includes only one feature film, Tequila, made in 1991, many years after his first short films Magueyes, La fórmula secreta and Los murmullos. Gámez was able to experiment with cinematographic language and work with total freedom outside the film industry.

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Rubén Gámez | 1976 | Mexico | 25’ | Digital

An essay by Alfredo Ruiz

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Los murmullos

Rubén Gámez (1928–2002)

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Rubén Gámez: Los murmullos + The Secret Formula

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Luke Fowler | 2021 | UK | approx. 30’ For this one-off performance, Luke Fowler presents a spatial sound composition from quarter inch reels and optical soundtracks that he re-discovered in Margaret Tait’s archive. This is the second work Fowler has made in tribute to the legacy of Tait, having also completed his short film Houses (for Margaret) for the centenary. This new work was produced entirely from sounds, music and poetry found in the late filmmaker’s tape archive. The tapes were digitised by Fowler as part of his ongoing research into Tait for a feature length portrait, which is forthcoming.

With thanks to Dr. Sarah Neely (Margaret Tait 100) and Orkney Library & Archive.

For Dan

Sun 12th September Genesis Cinema, 20.00 Mum’s Cards

Luke Fowler | 2018 | UK | 9’ | 16mm

“We were teenage acid casualties.” Morgan Quaintance’s account of adolescent experiences with psychedelic drugs – told through still images and on-screen text – is contrasted with the transcendental promise of consciousness expansion advocated by the likes of Timothy Leary on the soundtrack. Quaintance’s highly personal narrative exposes the crude reality and violence of growing up in South London in the early 1990s (“there was no fourth dimension”) and is written from the perspective of the survivor.

A Human Certainty Morgan Quaintance | 2021 | UK | 20’ | Digital

A heartbreak song, told through onscreen text, photographic stills and 16mm images – the beauty and sadness both unbearable and inevitable. Once again, Quaintance uses different layers of sound, music, images and text to build a personal narrative that is looking inwards and outwards – autobiographical and romantic but not oblivious to societal issues and urban violence. Made during and between lockdowns, the filmmaker thinks about the lives of medieval saints and the photographer Weegee, whilst he considers separation, loss and death: “If the future is for the living, then memories are a graveyard for the dead.”

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Mum’s Cards is a tender and oblique film portrait of the ground-breaking sociologist of culture, Professor Bridget Fowler, who is also Fowler’s mother. A portrait constructed in absence – in which index cards, a system used for note keeping over many decades, serve as a proxy for an image of the scholar herself. Mum’s Cards also transcends the portrait form to address issues around class and gender in British academia, as well as philosophical questions around the organisation of knowledge.

A companion piece to Mum’s Cards, For Dan explores an intense period of correspondence between the artist’s late father and his closest friend, radical university lecturer Dan O’Neill.

Filmed in an eco-community in Queensland, the film impressionistically documents both the friendship between these two young men and sketches a partial political history of Australia in the early 1960s.

Morgan Quaintance | 2020 | UK | 18’ | Digital | Available Online

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Luke Fowler | 2021 | UK | 12’ | 16mm

Surviving You, Always

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Luke Fowler’s 16mm films tell the stories of alternative movements in Britain, from psychiatry to photography to music to education. Morgan Quaintance’s work – also often shot on 16mm – explores collective cultural, social, and political moments from the past that shape our present. Both filmmakers interweave archival footage with their own camerawork, articulating a relationship between the personal and the collective, the amateur and the professional. This screening, which will be followed by a conversation between Fowler and Quaintance, will present their work in dialogue for the first time. It focuses on recent works which take a personal turn and will also include a new sound work by Luke Fowler.

Listening in a place (Heartlandscape Orkney)

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In Dialogue: Luke Fowler & Morgan Quaintance

FILM PROGRAMME

Rock Bottom Riser

OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

Sun 12th September Bertha DocHouse, 20.30 Director Fern Silva

Country USA Duration 70’ Format Digital Available Online

THE ART OF NON-FICTION

Year 2021

Rock Bottom Riser is an essay film that explores connections between geology, astrology and settler colonialism on the island of Hawaii. The film is centred around a proposed plan to build the Thirty Meter Telescope (the largest on earth) on the mountain of Mauna Kea – a dormant volcano and one of the most sacred sites in native Hawaiian culture.

Through the voices of indigenous activists opposing its construction, Silva expands the conversation outwards to include considerations of Polynesian navigation techniques, indigenous cosmology, the arrival of Christian missionaries, pop-cultural representations of Hawaiian identity and the island’s fragile ecology. Silva incorporates an array of visual and sonic materials to construct a surprising and multifaceted investigation of Hawaiian history, culture and politics.

In partnership with Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival

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Mon 13th September Curzon Soho, 18.30

Mon 13th September Goethe-Institut, 19.00

OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

Slade 150: No Film Is An Island

Year 2020 Country France, Burkina Faso, Belgium Duration 77’ Format Digital Available Online

In a style reminiscent of direct cinema, After the Crossing closely follows Inza, a young Ivorian man known to his friends as Bourgeois, who was also the protagonist of Akafou’s previous documentary Vivre Riche. Inza has survived the long and dangerous journey across the desert and the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe but now finds himself stuck in Turin, waiting for a chance to cross the Alps and reach France, where a former girlfriend might be willing to take him in.

In the meantime, he relies on the hospitality of another lover, constantly making arrangements by phone while discussing his dreams and ambitions. The filmmaker immerses himself into the lives of Inza and his friends, intimately documenting the obstacles they face as they attempt to legalise their situations and make a living, and chronicling the strong sense of camaraderie amongst those who have shared similar experiences. “My look at their migrant journey shows the lost illusions of these young African men. I tried to show how hard it was for them to make the journey, which is often full of death, loneliness and disillusion, as well as how painful it is, for those who manage to land on European shores, to realise how illusionary the Eldorado they believed in really is.” (Joël Richmond Mathieu Akafou) In partnership with Wallonia-Brussels International

This autumn, the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, celebrates 150 years of fine art teaching and research with a varied programme of events which reflect on the past, present, future.

This evening event is an exploration of what happened when the Slade School of Fine Art became home to Britain’s first ever university film department. Led by Gaslight director Thorold Dickinson as “an experiment, a means of bombarding students with the art of film,” its legacies can be traced through artists’ moving image, cinema, and television; and through film culture more broadly. The story begins in the 1950s with the first films of Lorenza Mazzetti, an Italian survivor of Nazi persecution who talked her way into a place at the Slade, and involves an international cast of characters. Some are well-known, some unsung, but all were involved in making film into an accepted art medium in a way it had never been before. The introduction of film into British art schools transformed not only the art world, but the whole media landscape.

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Director Joël Richmond Mathieu Akafou

The evening will include rare short films and visual presentations by Slade Associate Professor Brighid Lowe and Sight and Sound critic Henry K. Miller, who will be joined by two special guests, Maysoon Pachachi (director of Our River…Our Sky, recently shot in Iraq) and Elizabeth Wood (Founder and Director of Bertha DocHouse), both Slade students in the 1960s, who will discuss their memories of being part of a pioneering moment in Britain’s film history.

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FILM PROGRAMME

After the Crossing (Traverser)

FILM PROGRAMME

If From Every Tongue it Drips Mon 13th September Genesis Cinema, 20.30

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Director Sharlene Bamboat Year 2021 Country Canada Duration 68’ Format Digital

Made between three locations, If From Every Tongue it Drips is assembled through a call and response exchange of sound, text and image. Interested in the framework of voice, vibration, time, sound and language that quantum physics explores, director Sharlene Bamboat’s film emerges from an exchange of theoretical entanglements but is practiced and rendered through bodily ones. In Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, Ponni writes Rekhti, a form of 19th century Urdu queer poetry as Sarala acts as camera person. On receiving the captured images, Bamboat based in Montreal, Canada passes back directorial instruction along with fragments of quantum theory which Sarala reads, this time filmed by Ponni. As the digital images repeatedly transcend geographic location to reach Bamboat, she lays her commentary on Sarala and Ponni’s images, overlapping her voice on theirs. Travelling further to the Isle of Skye in Scotland, the recordings reach Sharlene’s frequent collaborator, sound designer and musician Richy Carey, who enters a third space of deep listening, co-creating a sonic landscape that allows a further exchange of polyvocality through sound and image.

Into this assemblage, Bamboat weaves references to the interconnected impacts of British colonialism and Indian nationalism on contemporary poetry, dance and music in South Asia, nodding to her ongoing interest in both the many ways that popular culture can be politicised, as well as the sensuous possibilities of its reclamation.

This screening of If from Every Tongue it Drips is a collaboration with Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival and is accompanied by a specially commissioned video performance by Toronto-based musician Nick Dourado and writer-programmer Aaditya Agarawal, who trace the cultural lineages of music in the film spanning geographies, language and social movements.

17th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival

The UK’s Festival for New Cinema and Artists’ Moving Image bfmaf.org

10—12 September 2021 in Berwick-upon-Tweed 13—30 September 2021 online

@berwickfilmfest

Ute Aurand | 2020 | Germany, UK | 4’ | Digital

Liberty: an ephemeral statute

Piano Practice

Maria Anastassiou | 2021 | UK | 8’ | Digital | Available Online A short portrait of the filmmaker’s mother at home in Nicosia. Now retired, she devotes herself to learning new skills including drawing, playing piano, painting Greek Orthodox icons and taking university classes in history and ancient Greek mythology. Anastassiou’s camera focuses on her mother’s hand gestures as she draws, speaks, plays, and describes various modes of note-taking – and we think of the daughter’s hands holding the Bolex camera.

OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

After twenty-five years, Ute Aurand revisits 16mm footage shot whilst visiting the late filmmaker Margaret Tait. Orkney landscapes, roses in a garden, domestic rituals – Aurand’s images sketch out Tait’s filmic vocabulary as the blurriness of time and memory is accentuated by the use of abstract colour images.

Commissioned for the “Margaret Tait 100” centenary project.

OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2021

FILM PROGRAMME

This combined programme includes recent work by Maria Anastassiou, Rebecca Jane Arthur, Ute Aurand, Alexandra Cuesta.

Glimpses from a Visit to Orkney in Summer 1995

FILM PROGRAMME

Combined Programme 4

Notes, Imprints (On Love): Part I & Part II, Carmela Alexandra Cuesta | 2020 | Ecuador, USA | 25’ | Digital | Available Online

Two opening instalments of a six-part series that meditates on love and the act of making, Notes, Imprints (on Love) is crafted from autobiographical footage shot in Upstate New York, Chile, Japan, Los Angeles, the California Desert, Miami and Mexico City. “I wanted to approach filmmaking as a ritual of the everyday, using 16mm film to record objects, spaces, light; without hierarchy and without thinking of an end product. I had wanted to capture all the things. Everything and nothing at the same time: the sun falling on my kitchen plant, dilapidating factories in this American city, my husband’s back as he sleeps, the snow on the deck.

What began as a spontaneous collection of images, in time became a documentation of my private realm, and this practice of daily filming continued for three years (2015-18), in various cities.” (Alexandra Cuesta)

Liberty: an ephemeral statute begins at sea.

We soon glimpse the Statue of Liberty, the Manhattan skyline presumed rather than seen through the mist and clouds. Blue sky and blue sea meet, the ghostlike city functions as the horizon line that delineates one blue from the other. Liberty is the retelling of a personal story of migration, that of the filmmaker’s mother, who left behind the certainties (and constraints) of a life that had been written out for her in Scotland in order to embrace the possibilities of an imagined one in America. Though her American Dream had been partly triggered by representations of a “domestic utopia,” this bold move took place in the early 1970s, in the aftermath of the post-1968 women’s liberation movements.

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Mon 13th September Bertha DocHouse, 20.30

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Rebecca Jane Arthur | 2020 | Belgium, UK | 37’ | Digital | Available Online

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Talks & Workshops

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Thu 9th September–Mon 13th September Festival Hub

Organising a Film Tour Thu 9th September Festival Hub, 12.30–14.00

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Critics Workshop

In partnership with Another Gaze

Writing Surgeries

Thu 9th September, Festival Hub

We invite you to submit a working draft of your text, in any stage of completion for one-to-one tutorials with not/nowhere. Particular areas of interest include English as second language; creative or non-grammatical uses of English; mixes between two languages; text-as-collage; non-cognitive approaches to process; re-considering legibility; new modes of storytelling; theatrical or filmic approaches to text; channelling and writing from different voices. “Any stage of completion” means abstract, outline, treatment, first draft, second draft, final edits are all welcome.

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Another Gaze is a feminist film journal, founded in January 2016 to provide nuanced criticism about women and queers as filmmakers, protagonists and spectators.

not/nowhere is an artist workers’ cooperative that programmes workshops, screenings, exhibitions and other events. Their mission is to ensure that local artists who use new media in their work can access film and media equipment, and acquire the training to use these machines creatively. not/nowhere is committed to Black and POC artists exploring new possibilities for owning the means of production and finding sustainability in their practice.

Surgery participation is application based and we envision capacity for 6-8 participants across 2 tutors.

Closing date: 25th August.

In partnership with not/nowhere

In this workshop we will consider the practicalities and possibilities of self-organising independent film tours of community spaces, meeting halls and cinemas. This will cover approaching venues, promoting screenings, inviting guest speakers, fundraising, community building and what happens after the event. Lucy Parker and Ed Webb-Ingall will facilitate this event based on their experiences touring Solidarity (2019) and We Have Rather Been Invaded (2018). At the end of the session we hope to co-create a resource to support future film tours.

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The Critics Workshop is an immersive five-day programme developed with the Another Gaze editorial team that will provide an introduction to the ethics and methodologies of feminist film criticism for 12 selected participants. It will look at questions such as: should the role of a feminist publication be wholly celebratory?

How useful are terms such as “intersectional” and the “female gaze”? What duties do we have to others in critical writing? How should we write about works by “neglected” women filmmakers, who are older or no longer alive?

Thu 9th September Festival Hub, 17.00–18.00

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Through visual presentations, sonic installations, and conversation, this session aims to reflect upon the extremis of London in lockdown and to imagine new possibilities of how we might choose to reinhabit the city space. Contributors are drawn together through their shared interest in London as a site of urban research. The conversation will range from: the effect of lockdown on young people living in estates; the lasting effect of closing down nightlife space; an extension of the surveillance network to biometrics; and move towards a reimagining of public space and the environmental potentials revealed through this seminal moment of locking down the city.

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Arranged by: Henrietta Williams, Bartlett School of Architecture .

Contributions from: Dr Merijn Royaards, Nathaniel Telemaque, Nozomi Nakabayashi, and Dr Edward Denison.

Covid-19 has impacted all aspects of our lives and is affecting the visual arts community, including artists working with the moving image in numerous ways. This fast-changing and uncertain situation brings with it questions about the short- and long-term impact on creative practice. Join us for the launch of a special issue of MIRAJ (Moving Image Review & Art Journal) that engages with the current crisis, providing testimonies to the experience of the past year and imagining new strategies in a post pandemic world.

Contributors to the issue will join editors Michael Mazière and Lucy Reynolds for a panel discussion.

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Thu 9th September Festival Hub, 14.30-16.30

Launch of MIRAJ Special Issue “Artists’ Moving Image, Isolation and Covid-19”

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The Return to the City

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Sat 11th September Festival Hub, 15.30–18.30

A single afternoon accelerated workshop for filmmakers and artists working with film seeking to develop their next project. Over three concentrated hours we will explore conceptualisation and articulation of ideas, placing projects, building partnerships and context, fundraising, production and organisation, and exhibition and distribution strategies. The emphasis will be on real world advice, which can be applied to your project right now. Cutting through the noise, we will be getting down to brass tacks over three panels with a series of guests including filmmakers, producers and distributors, all hosted by Benjamin Cook, Director of LUX. The Project Bootcamp is particularly aimed at students, recent graduates and emerging filmmakers and artists.

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Fri 10th September, Festival Hub, 14.00-18.00

More than a circle of chairs: A collaborative video workshop

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Project Bootcamp (for those that don’t have time)

In partnership with LUX and On & For Production and Distribution

Masterclass: Alia Syed Imprint Document Fiction

In Focus artist and filmmaker Alia Syed will discuss her practice: “As a child, navigating my way through the world, I built bridges; at first tentatively, almost always painfully.

Finding a way through what I felt to be true; what I was told to be true; and what I wanted to be true.

Rhythms carried me, different ports. Cadence reverberated in fleeting comfort.

Tactics of survival return when confronted with factual inaccuracies, silent omissions, the troubling of feeling when documents scream back.

The unsubstantiated continues to facilitate a way of making.

Over the course of an afternoon, together, we will experiment with different techniques and methods to record a variety of group formations. We will try out a number of approaches to collective representation, from one-on-one interviews to group discussions. Drawing on documentaries, community videos and artist films, we will explore what it means to document collective conversations.

This workshop will be facilitated by Ed Webb-Ingall, as part of his ongoing research into collective and collaborative video making, and filmmaker and artist Jasmine Johnson. This will be a practical workshop.

Please come willing to be on camera and experiment behind the camera. No previous experience necessary.

Equipment and refreshments will be supplied.

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Tracing a methodology into the present, this talk will attempt to elucidate different writing strategies in relation to research embedded within political and social histories.”

Image Credit: The Spaghetti City Video Manual (1974)

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Sat 11th September, Festival Hub, 13.00-14.30

Sun 12th September Festival Hub, 15.00–17.00

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Speaking of time spent in conversation at another woman’s home, Katherine McKittrick writes, “Each time I leave I feel as though I have been swimming for seven hours.”

Join artists Hope Strickland and Onyeka Igwe in a collective reading and discussion of McKittrick’s Dear Science and Other Stories. The artists will select short extracts to read together and use as a starting point to think through strategies for applying non-Western ways of knowing and post-colonial/black methodologies to moving image practices. How can an interdisciplinary creative practice be rebellious? How can it be committed to open possibilities for collective care?

This group is for people who identify as BPoC and are interested in sharing moving image practice or research. People are encouraged to read the text ahead of the session if they have access to it, but no prior knowledge is required.

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“In this session I propose to discuss the relationship between sound and image in film and video. Taking my own film practice and several other key influences as case studies I will unpack how I have worked collaboratively with sound artists, field recordists and composers on every part of the film production from its conception to shooting and finally the mixing/postproduction. I will discuss the distinctions between the camera and the microphone, recording and listening as well as the distinct concerns of working with sound in different contexts, from the cinema to the gallery and live performance. In this seminar I will also consider different strategies to working with the voice, where the filmmaker, as I have tended to, chooses to disrupt or circumvent a traditional ‘sync sound’ model. I will touch on both the theory and practice of why one would choose to work like this, whilst taking into account both contemporary and historical examples of how others have dealt with these issues in their practice.” (Luke Fowler)

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Sun 12th September Festival Hub, 12.30-14.15

swimming for seven hours; a reading group

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Masterclass: Luke Fowler

Convened by Erika Balsom and Elena Gorfinkel, this day-long event will focus on the practice of writing about cinema, particularly as it takes shape on the margins of mainstream film criticism and academic publishing. Bringing together a group of contributors for a series of presentations, readings, and conversations, it will explore the role of small film publications in the past and present, consider matters of editorial practice, examine how criticism intersects with filmmaking and creative writing, and excavate the history of heterodox forms of writing about cinema.

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Café & Happy Hours Festival Hub Café The Colombian Coffee Company will be returning to the Festival Hub this year, serving up delicious singleorigin coffee, plus a selection of cakes and food at our Festival Hub Café at China Exchange (2nd floor).

Open Thursday 9th–Tuesday 14th from 10am.

Slade 150: Film & Pedagogy

Happy Hours

Tue 14th September, Festival Hub, 10.30–12.30

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Mon 13th September Festival Hub, 10.00–17.30

CAF É & HAPPY HO U R S

On Film Writing: Forms and Histories

This autumn, the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, celebrates 150 years of fine art teaching and research with a varied programme of events which reflect on the past, present, and future. This panel discussion, chaired by Benjamin Cook, director of LUX, with alumni and lecturers from the Slade, will discuss the changes in moving image production and its impact on filmmaking and teaching over the decades. LUX distributes the work of many Slade alumni, some of whom were instrumental in setting up the London Film Makers’ Co-operative in the 1960s and early 1970s.

In partnership with the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL

Thu 9th Sept, 17:30–19:00 Fri 10th Sept, 17:30–19:00 Sat 11th Sept, 18:30–20:00 Sun 12th Sept, 17:00–19:00, Happy Hour & Awards Ceremony

We’ll be announcing the festival award winners at Sunday’s happy hour, so grab a drink and help us toast the winning filmmakers.

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Meet other delegates and festival filmmakers at our daily happy hour networking events. Drinks will be provided by our sponsors Brixton Brewery and Bodega Bay Hard Seltzer.

Mon 13th Sept, 17:30–19:00

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Festival Hub (China Exchange, 32A Gerrard Street, London, W1D 6JA)

E X PAN D E D R EAL I TI ES

Expanded Realities

LGBTQ+ VR Museum

Expanded Realities showcases storytelling at the intersection of art and technology. This year’s collection includes interactive web documentaries, 360 films and virtual reality experiences.

The exhibition will be free to the public. We will be following government guidance for public safety.

Booking Information

The exhibition will be open from Thursday 9th – Tuesday 14th September:

Thu 9th Sept, 11:00–17:30 Fri 10th Sept, 11:00–17:30 Sat 11th Sept, 11:00–18:30 Sun 12th Sept, 11:00–17:00 Mon 13th Sept, 11:00–17:30 Tuesday 14th Sept, 11:00–14:00

Bystanding: The Feingold Syndrome An immersive-interactive VR docufiction exploring the drowning and rescue of Israeli rowing-champion Jasmine Feingold. In 2009, Feingold lost consciousness and capsized while rowing in a Tel Aviv River. During those five minutes, none of the passersby took action to help her, until finally, one person did.

DEEP A meditative virtual reality experience controlled by breathing. The synesthetic mix of your own breathing, hypnotic visuals, and stunning binaural soundscape helps to draw you deeper into a relaxed and meditative state.

Director / Project Lead: Owen Harris + Niki Smit Producer: Sarah Ticho Developer / Director of Photography: Michael Townsend, Cale Bradbury Running Time: 20’ Country: Netherlands, Canada

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The exhibition is free to attend and will operate an on-site reservation system. You will be able to book individual time slots for interactive projects, while our 360 cinema will offer time slots where you can select a number of experiences. Registration will only be available in person at the Festival Hub.

Reacting to the COVID-19 shut down, Ilios is a meditation on the state of flux we are all living in today: a state where patterns emerge only to undergo change in such sudden succession that reality and normality can only be assumed in short bursts.

Director / Project Lead: Co-directed by Marcel Karnapke and Mika Johnson Producer: Daisy with Rider Productions Running Time: 8’ Country: Germany, Czech Republic

An inclusive, individual virtual reality (VR) art experience where free bodily expression takes the user into a space of kinesthetic composition and active awareness of oneself. It draws on physical interaction as a manifestation of participatory media art using new technology.

Director / Project Lead: Hanna Pajala-Assefa Producer: Hanna Pajala-Assefa Developer / Director of Photography: Danile Leggat, Janne Storm Running Time: 12’ Country: Finland

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The exhibition is at the Festival Hub (China Exchange, 32A Gerrard Street, London, W1D 6JA)

Ilios

Skeleton Conductor XR Art

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Exhibition

A virtual reality museum showcasing the objects, stories and artwork of LGBTQ+ people.

The walls are decorated with 2D illustrations and photographs by talented queer artists all over the world. The museum contains 3D scans of real-life objects, chosen by people in the LGBTQ+ community, accompanied by their own narration.

Director / Project Lead / Producer: Antonia Forster Developer / Director of Photography: Thomas Terkildsen Country: UK

Director / Project Lead: Nim Shapira Producer: Roi Lev Developer / Director of Photography: Co-produced by AnotherWorld VR (Max Sacker and Ioulia Isserlis) & KngFu Screenwriting: Lior Zalmanson Volumetric Technology: TETAVI Running Time: 10’ Country: Israel, Germany, Canada

EX PANDED R E ALI T I E S

Interactive Projects

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Looking to maximise your festival experience?

Installations

Our interactive installation pieces tell stories in non-traditional formats. This includes two interactive web-docs that travel across space, time, place and memory.

UCL Showcase

Experience work from students, staff and alumni of University College London. We will have projects from faculties across UCL where XR is being implemented in fields including computer science, architecture, art and medicine.

Our Industry Accreditation allows you to take full advantage of our programme and stay up to date with the latest developments in the industry. Suitable for aspiring documentarians looking to take the next step, as well as industry professionals looking for creative reinvigoration, our delegates receive access to films, talks, and networking opportunities throughout the festival.

We also offer Student Accreditation for undergraduate and graduate students (including those who are graduating in 2021). This type of accreditation grants free access to our ticketing ballot, Talks & Workshops programme, daily networking opportunities, screening platform, and more.

For more information and to purchase your accreditation visit: opencitylondon.com/2021-festival/accreditation

Online platform Our online pass gives you access to the festival’s online screening platform where you can watch a selection of films from the festival’s main programme along with pre-recorded director Q&As. All films will be made accessible with closed caption subtitles.

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The platform will be available from the 13th–23rd of September in the UK only.

Please visit our website for more information and to see the full list of available titles

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Tickets to screenings can be booked online or in person at the relevant cinema venue. Tickets to our Talks & Workshops, can be booked online only. For further information, please visit: opencitylondon.com

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Our 360 Cinema selection will screen a selection of immersive films that explore our connection to the earth, safe -spaces for subcultures, familial memories, and rapid urbanisation.

Tickets & Booking

TI CK ETS & BO O KI N G

360 Cinema

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Genesis Cinema 93-95 Mile End Rd, Bethnal Green, London E1 4UJ

Ciné Lumière Institut Français 17 Queensberry Pl South Kensington London SW7 2DT

Goethe-Institut 50 Princes Gate Exhibition Rd London SW7 2PH

Programme Advisors: Jonathan Ali, Wanling Chen, Jesse Cumming, Carmen Gray, Marcus Jack, Anjana Janardhan, Viktoriya Kalashnikova, Emily Wright UCL Public Anthropology Team: Laurence Avis, Rosi Hirst, Ripley Parker, Michael Stewart Open City Documentary Festival team would like to thank:

Curzon Soho 99 Shaftesbury Ave London W1D 5DY

Mimosa House 47 Theobalds Rd London WC1X 8SP

All festival volunteers, all participating filmmakers, artists and speakers Rebecca Jane Arthur, Ute Aurand, Erika Balsom, Matthew Barrington, Bertha DocHouse (Thomas Humphrey, Jenny Horwell, Tilly Hudson, Nora Seelmann, Elizabeth Wood), Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (Jemma Desai, Hamish Young, Peter

Taylor), British Georgian Society (Jason Osborn), June Campbell, CBA (Javier Packer-Comyn, François Rapaille), China Exchange (Freya AitkenTurff), Ciné Lumière (Diane Gabrysiak, Thomas Riley), Cineteca Nacional de México (Dora Moreno, Tzutzumatzin Soto Cortés), Luis Coutinho, CREAM Westminster (Michael Mazière, Lucy Reynolds), Curzon Soho (Margot Daviot-Fernandez, Michael Garrad, Fee Meynell, Harriet Robinson), Deutsche Kinemathek - Museum für Film und Fernsehen (Anke Hahn), Simon Duffy, Ava Eldred, Embassy of Sweden in London (Sofia Lundström, Pia Lundberg), Embassy of Switzerland in the UK (David Beck), Ted Fendt, Fireflies Press (Giovanni Marchini Camia), Eduardo Florez, William Fowler, Susana Gámez, Grace Gilroy, Goethe-Institut (Maren Hobein, Ibrahim Hussain, Celine Keuer), Elena Gorfinkel, Il Cinema Ritrovato (Guy Karim Borlée), Gary Green, Sara Hawley, George Hood, Genesis Cinema (Christina Papasotiriou, Bobbie Hughes), ICA (Nico Marzano, Nicolas Raffin), IMCINE (Jannike Curuchet, Mónica Martínez Orihuela, Fernanda Rio Armesilla), Instituto Cervantes London (Ignacio Peyró, Juan Blas Delgado Ramos), Institut Ramon Llull (Susana Millet, Marc Dueñas), Japan Foundation (Darian De La Cruz, Junko Takekawa), Kanatasha, Kiroku Eiga Hozon Center (Yuko Hamasaki), Brigitte Keijzer, Korean Cultural Centre UK (Jaemin Cha), Marie Logie, LUX (Matt Carter, Benjamin Cook, Alice Lea & Charlotte Procter), Olivier Marboeuf, Mimosa House (Mollie Barnes, Daria Khan, Divya Osbon), Chie Moriwaki, Andrew Northrop, Richard Palmer, PieterPaul Mortier, Aily Tanaka Nash, not/nowhere (Taylor Le Melle, Jennifer Martin, Rhea Storr, Daniella Valz Gen), Garbiñe Ortega, Jayne Parker, Matías Piñeiro, Ben Rivers, Alfredo Ruiz, Daniella Shreir, Sophie Strang, Peter Todd, Ana Vaz, UCL Anthropology (Wendy Chandler, Ana Ghica, Martin Holbraad, Rikke Osterlund), Wallonie-Bruxelles Images (Hervé Le Phuez), Wallonie-Bruxelles International (Simona Palma, Jonathan Bangels), Mark & Frances Webber, Ed Webb-Ingall, Henri Williams

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Bertha DocHouse Curzon Bloomsbury The Brunswick Centre London WC1N 1AW

Open City Documentary Festival Team Albert Millis - Immersive Coordinator Anna Stopford - Volunteer Coordinator Arzzita Nash - Guest Services Coordinator David Leister - Projection Dora Mckay - Events Coordinator Eva Coulibaly-Willis - Guest Services Assistant Georgie Cowan-Turner - Marketing Assistant Huda Awan - Content Producer Lucy Wardley - Festival Producer María Palacios Cruz - Festival Director Marta Berto - Marketing Manager Oliver Wright - Director of Film Programming Olivia Hird – Production Manager Passport - Branding and Design Ricardo Matos Cabo - Programmer (In Focus: Renate Sami / Haneda Sumiko Tribute) Rosi Hirst - Proofreading Sean Welsh & Megan Mitchell (Matchbox Cine) - Captioning Will Swinburne - Technical Manager

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Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) The Mall St. James’s London SW1Y 5AH

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Festival Hub China Exchange 32A Gerrard St London W1D 6JA

Team & Thanks

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Venues

Digital Digital Digital Digital Digital Digital 16mm Digital 16mm 16mm Digital Digital

16mm Digital Digital Digital Digital 16mm Digital 16mm Digital Digital Digital 35mm Digital Digital Digital Digital Digital N/A Digital Digital Digital 16mm Digital

19’ 11’ 28’ 7’ 43’ 8’46’’ 60’ 90’ 23’ 20’ 13’ 32’

12’ 104’ 110’ 21’ 4’ 22’ 13’ 7’ 58’ 68’ 8’ 16’ 88’ 111’ 100’ 17’ 37’ 30’ approx 25’ 180’ 53’ 9’ 25’

Switzerland, Russian Federation UK Brazil Republic of Korea Colombia, Canada UK Germany Belgium, Cameroon UK UK USA Germany

2020 1972 2019 2021 2021 2021 1985 2021 2003 1992 2020 2005

France, Germany Spain, UK Germany, UK

Spain Hong Kong Belgium, France France USA Belgium, UK UK Mexico Hong Kong UK UK Ecuador, USA

2021 2021 2020 2020 2020 1967 2021 2021 2021 2021 2020 2021 1967 2020 2020 2021 1976 2019 2019 2018 2020

Maddi Barber Simon Liu Günter Peter Straschek Margaret Salmon Sharlene Bamboat Hope Strickland Laida Lertxundi Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers Vincent Meessen Jean-Luc Godard Suneil Sanzgiri Rebecca Jane Arthur Luke Fowler Rubén Gámez Jill Li Alia Syed Luke Fowler Alexandra Cuesta

Spain Hong Kong, UK Germany UK Canada UK

UK France, Italy 2021 1979

Luke Fowler Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub Christophe Cognet Gerard Ortín Castellví Ute Aurand

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Just a Movement (Juste un mouvement) La Chinoise Letter From Your Far-Off Country Liberty: an ephemeral statute Listening in a place (Heartlandscape Orkney) Los murmullos Lost Course (迷航) Meta Incognita: Missive II Mum’s Cards Notes, Imprints (On Love):

For Dan From the Cloud to the Resistance (Dalla nube alla resistenza) From Where They Stood (À pas aveugles) Future Foods Glimpses from a Visit to Orkney in Summer 1995 Gorria (Red) Happy Valley Hooray for Mrs. E (Hurra für Frau E.) Icarus (after Amelia) If From Every Tongue it Drips If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever) Inner Outer Space Inside the Red Brick Wall (理大圍城)

Apiyemiyekî?

Back to Back Bicentenario Boots on Ground Cesare Pavese Turin – Santo Stefano Belbo Delphine’s Prayers (Les prières de Delphine) Eating Grass Fatima’s Letter Figure Minus Fact Filmdiaries 1975-1985 (Wanderings) (Filmtagebuch 1975-1985 (Streifzüge))

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All Other Things Equal All You Need’s an Excuse

Portugal

Digital Digital 12’ 77’

Germany France, Burkina Faso, Belgium

2011 2020

Renate Sami Joël Richmond Mathieu Akafou Anya Tsyrlina Tony Wickert (Liberation Films) Ana Vaz Jooyeon Lee Pablo Álvarez Mesa Kiran Kaur Brar Renate Sami & Petra Seeger Rosine Mbakam Alia Syed Alia Syed Mary Helena Clark Renate Sami

Digital Digital Digital 20’ 19’ 25’

UK UK Japan

2021 2020 1957

Morgan Quaintance Onyeka Igwe Haneda Sumiko

Digital

2021

Ana Vaz

13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (13 Maneiras de Olhar para um Pássaro Negro) A Human Certainty a so-called archive A Women’s College in the Village (Machi no fujin gakkyu - 村の婦人学級) A Year (Ein Jahr) After the Crossing (Traverser)

Country 31’

Year

Format

D I R E CTO RY / I NDEX

Running Time

Directory / Index

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Director

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Film Title

1 04

DI RECTO RY / I N D E X

57 67 48 85 77 74 68 25 76 84

15 60

58 59 30 14 82 49

41 54 85

77 31

71 55 45 49 33 40 21 21 59 36

52 44

36 80

77 49 63

70

Page

Digital 16mm

16mm Digital Digital 16mm 35mm Digital Digital Digital Digital

Digital Digital 16mm Digital 16mm

16mm 16mm Digital

42’ 26’ 72’ 3’ 18’ 5’ 90’ 101’ 32’ 22’ 55’ 43’

35’ 83’ 60’ 8’ 42’ 70’ 480’ 200’ 63’

17’ 7’ 15’ 66’ 60’

4’ 93’ 17’

UK Brazil UK UK UK UK Switzerland, Germany, Georgia United States UK UK Belgium, Senegal, Cameroon Japan

USA Germany Germany Mexico Mexico USA, Sweden, Japan, UK Spain

2019 2021 2021 1968 2020 1987 2021 2004 1974 1975 2020 1977

2018 2021 1990 1983 1965 2021 2020 2020 2020

2021 2021 1986 2010 1975

1995 1990 2020

Alia Syed Jessica Sarah Rinland Charlotte Ginsborg Simon Hartog Morgan Quaintance Alia Syed Salome Jashi James Benning Paul Morrison (Inter-Action) Andy Porter & Alfonso “Fons” Santana Hamedine Kane Haneda Sumiko

Sílvia das Fadas Ben Russell Renate Sami Renate Sami Rubén Gámez Miko Revereza & Carolina Fusilier C.W. Winter & Anders Edström Luis López Carrasco Nicolás Zukerfeld

Shireen Seno Jayne Parker Alia Syed Alia Syed Renate Sami

Renate Sami Renate Sami Ross Meckfessel

Germany USA

Germany

Philippines UK UK UK Germany

Argentina

Portugal, Austria, USA

Digital Digital Digital Digital Digital 16mm Digital 16mm Digital Digital

Digital 16mm Digital Digital Digital 16mm Digital 16mm Digital Digital n/a n/a 12’ 12’ 31’ 8’ 16’ 12’ 9’ 6’ 70’ 82’ n/a n/a

2013 1966 2021 2021 2014 2012 2020 2021 2021 2020 n/a n/a

Renate Sami Holger Meins Graeme Arnfield Maria Anastassiou Alia Syed Alia Syed Ana Vaz Ute Aurand Fern Silva Tatiana Mazú González various various

Country

Germany Germany UK UK UK UK Brazil Germany USA Argentina n/a n/a

Year

Format

D I R E CTO RY / I NDEX

Running Time

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The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) The Year of Discovery (El año del descubrimiento) There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse (No existen treinta y seis maneras de mostrar cómo un hombre se sube a un caballo) To Pick a Flower Triforium Unfolding Wallpaper We All Die, The Main Thing However is How and How We Live. Holger Meins (Es stirbt allerdings ein jeder Frage ist nur wie und wie du gelebt hast. Holger Meins) when you see a rose (wenn du eine rose siehst) With Pyramids (Mit Pyramiden) Zero Length Spring

The House is Yet to Be Built (A casa, a verdadeira e a seguinte, ainda está por fazer) The Invisible Mountain The Journey to Cairo (Die Fahrt nach Kairo) The Protection Foil (Die Schutzfolie) The Secret Formula (La fórmula secreta) The Still Side (El lado quieto)

The Blue House (La maison bleue) The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms (Usuzumi no sakura - 薄墨の桜)

Part I & Part II, Carmela On the Lake (Am Lietzensee) Oskar Langenfeld. 12 Mal Pervading Animal Piano Practice Points of Departure Priya Pseudosphynx RENATE Rock Bottom Riser Shady River (Río Turbio) Slade 150: No Film Is An Island Slade 150: recent moving image from the Slade Snow Sol de Campinas Songs for the River Soul in a White Room Surviving You, Always Swan Taming the Garden (მოთვინიერება) TEN SKIES The Amazing Story of Talacre The Battle for Powis Square

Film Title

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DI RECTO RY / I N D E X

34 59

33

49 59 21 24 30

53

47

66

65 35 32 74 43

73

72 63

23 45 64 56 77 20 46 16 44 44

36 30 55 85 22 23 71 36 79 42 81 50

Page

OP EN CIT Y D O CUMEN TARY FE S T I VAL 2 021 T HE A RT OF NON- FICT ION 108

Event

Date

Venue

Time

Event

Wednesday 8 Sept Wednesday 8 Sept

Mimosa House Curzon Soho

12:00-18:00 18:30

Saturday 11 Sept

Genesis Cinema

15:30

Thursday 9 Sept Thursday 9 Sept Thursday 9 Sept Thursday 9 Sept Thursday 9 Sept Thursday 9 Sept

Festival Hub Festival Hub Mimosa House Festival Hub Festival Hub Festival Hub

10:00-12:00 n/a 12:00-18:00 12:30-14:00 14:30-16:30 17:00-18:00

Saturday 11 Sept Saturday 11 Sept

Curzon Soho Ciné Lumière

16:00 18:00

Thursday 9 Sept Thursday 9 Sept Thursday 9 Sept Thursday 9 Sept Thursday 9 Sept Thursday 9 Sept

Ciné Lumière Curzon Soho Bertha DocHouse Goethe-Institut ICA Genesis Cinema

18:15 18:15 18:20 18:30 18:30 18:40

Saturday 11 Sept Saturday 11 Sept Saturday 11 Sept Saturday 11 Sept Saturday 11 Sept Sunday 12 Sept Sunday 12 Sept

Genesis Cinema Curzon Soho ICA Genesis Cinema ICA Festival Hub ICA

18:05 18:20 18:30 20:30 20:45 10:00-12:00 12:00

Sunday 12 Sept Sunday 12 Sept Sunday 12 Sept Sunday 12 Sept Sunday 12 Sept

Festival Hub Goethe-Institut Ciné Lumière Curzon Soho Festival Hub

12:30-14:15 13:30 14:00 14:00 15:00-17:00

Thursday 9 Sept Friday 10 Sept Friday 10 Sept Friday 10 Sept

ICA Festival Hub Mimosa House Festival Hub

20:45 10:00-12:00 12:00-18:00 14:00-18:00

Sunday 12 Sept Sunday 12 Sept Sunday 12 Sept Sunday 12 Sept

Genesis Cinema Festival Hub Genesis Cinema Bertha DocHouse

15:20 17:00-17:30 17:40 18:00

Friday 10 Sept Friday 10 Sept Friday 10 Sept Friday 10 Sept Friday 10 Sept Friday 10 Sept Saturday 11 Sept Saturday 11 Sept Saturday 11 Sept Saturday 11 Sept Saturday 11 Sept

Ciné Lumière Bertha DocHouse Curzon Soho ICA Goethe-Institut Genesis Cinema Festival Hub Mimosa House Festival Hub Goethe-Institut Ciné Lumière

18:15 18:20 18:30 20:00 20:30 20:45 10:00-12:00 12:00-18:00 13:00-14:30 14:00 14:00

Sunday 12 Sept

Genesis Cinema

20:00

Sunday 12 Sept

Ciné Lumière

20:00

Saturday 11 Sept

Festival Hub

15:30-18:30

Alia Syed: Meta Incognita Opening night: Icarus (after Amelia) + Inner Outer Space Critics Workshop Writing Surgeries Alia Syed: Meta Incognita Organising a Film Tour The Return to the City Launch of MIRAJ Special Issue: “Artists’ Moving Image, Isolation and Covid-19” Delphine’s Prayers From Where They Stood Shady River In Focus: Renate Sami 1 The Still Side A Story, a Battle and An Excuse: Presented by The London Community Video Archive In Focus: Alia Syed 1 Critics Workshop Alia Syed: Meta Incognita Project Bootcamp (for those that don’t have time) From the Cloud to the Resistance Sol de Campinas + Bicentenario Taming the Garden The Year of Discovery In Focus: Renate Sami 2 Combined Programme 1 Critics Workshop Alia Syed: Meta Incognita Masterclass: Alia Syed In Focus: Renate Sami 3 Slade 150: recent moving image from the Slade More than a circle of chairs: A collaborative video workshop

Sunday 12 Sept Monday 13 Sept Monday 13 Sept Monday 13 Sept Monday 13 Sept Monday 13 Sept Monday 13 Sept Tuesday 14 Sept Tuesday 14 Sept

Bertha DocHouse Festival Hub Genesis Cinema Curzon Soho Goethe-Institut Genesis Cinema Bertha DocHouse Festival Hub ICA

20:30 10:00-17:30 18:15 18:30 19:00 20:30 20:30 10:30-12:30 18:30

All Other Things Equal + There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse Combined Programme 2 Soul in a White Room + Just a Movement Combined Programme 3 Inside the Red Brick Wall Tribute to Haneda Sumiko Songs for the River The Invisible Mountain Critics Workshop The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) Masterclass: Luke Fowler In Focus: Renate Sami 4 La Chinoise Lost Course swimming for seven hours; a reading group Recent works by Ana Vaz Awards Ceremony In Focus: Alia Syed 2 The Blue House + The House is Yet to Be Built In Dialogue: Luke Fowler & Morgan Quaintance Ruben Gamez: Los murmullos + The Secret Formula Rock Bottom Riser On Film Writing: Forms and Histories In Focus: Alia Syed 3 After the Crossing Slade 150: No Film Is An Island If From Every Tongue it Drips Combined Programme 4 Slade 150: Film & Pedagogy TEN SKIES

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SCHE D U LE

S CHE D U L E

Schedule

MFA in Creative Documentary by Practice at UCL Anthropology A 2-year MFA providing all the technical and intellectual resources required to not just make outstanding non-fiction moving image, but to discover new ways of looking at the world.

Studio 3: Immersive Factual Storytelling (VR/AR)

The Immersive Factual Storytelling (VR/AR) studio is a pathway of UCL’s MA Ethnographic & Documentary Film programme - the first course of its kind in the UK, and one of the first in the world.

01

An advanced practical programme that draws upon broad-based anthropological and critical thinking, providing deep practical knowledge of the craft of non-fiction filmmaking,

02

Provides the tools to reconceptualise what documentary is and develop an understanding of documentary as research practise

03

For students with some experience of filmmaking who are imaginative, risk-taking and intellectually engaged, wishing to push the boundaries in the field

04

Led by a team of leading filmmakers including directors Sophie Fiennes (Grace Jones: Bloodlight & Bami, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema), Ellen Evans (Motherland, Country Girl), Dr. Sharone Lifschitz (The Visitor, The German Projects) and Grant Gee (Patience after Sebald, Innocence of Memories, Meeting People is Easy).

For more information please visit: ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/study/ graduate-taught

MA in Ethnographic and Documentary Film Practice at UCL Anthropology This unique practical MA programme is based at UCL but run by leading film practitioners including Marc Isaacs and Richard Alwyn, and offers high-quality practice-based learning in a top university research environment.

01

Offers the choice of 3 filmmaking studios (‘Ethnographic and Documentary Film Studio’, ‘Documentary Fiction Studio’, plus our leading cross-media studio ‘Immersive Factual Storytelling (VR/AR)’).

02

Students will produce 2 non-fiction films in various modes, developing a diverse portfolio of work, before producing a graduation film of 15-25 minutes in length.

03

Students have their own camera equipment and editing suites year-round, and a dedicated senior film maker guiding them through their final graduation film.

For more information please visit: ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/study/ graduate-taught

01

Provides students with a foundation in immersive factual storytelling formats - teaching filmmaking, spatial sound and post-production techniques for 360° VR and CG-based VR experiences.

02

Offers access to 360° filmmaking equipment throughout the year, alongside introduction to a wide range of the latest VR/AR and other immersive technologies.

03

Receive training from experts sitting at the heart of this new, fast-moving media sector, and be part of the generation that shapes immersive factual filmmaking for the future.

For more information please visit: ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/study/ graduate-taught

MA in Creative & Collaborative Enterprise

A practice-based MA for those who are starting innovative businesses where the way you do things and who you do them for is as important as what you do. It’s an application of creative practices to making and doing things that people need or want.

01

Students begin their enterprise during the course with small practical steps to deliver value and then implement iterative processes to create customers and grow a circle of interest in their product or service.

02

Creative and collaborative techniques are taught by leading practitioners from the UK’s performing arts communities.

03

The programme draws on social theory and ethnographic practice from UCL Anthropology and enterprise models including Lean Startup.

For more information please visit: ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/study/ graduate-taught

S HO RT COU RSES

Open City Docs School Autumn / Winter Short Courses

For general enquiries: info@opencitylondon.com Facebook: @OpenCityLondon Twitter: @OpenCityDocs Instagram: @OpenCityDocs

We’ve been running short documentary courses at UCL Anthropology. These vary from film theory lectures, curation, practical camera training, to sound recording, creating audio documentaries and working with archives. Find more information about the courses and book on our website.

OP EN CIT Y D O CUMEN TARY FE S T I VAL 2 021

Selected upcoming online courses: Documentary Storytelling With Dr Catalin Brylla, September 14th–October 19th, £150 A popular practice-led course suited for everyone looking to further their understanding of non-fiction cinema and its theoretical applications.

Documentary as Encounter With Juliette Joffé and Therese Henningsen, September 28th–November 2nd, £150 A rich and diverse journey through historical and contemporary filmmakers who use the camera as a tool for encounter.

T HE A RT OF NON- FICT ION

Archives in Non-Fiction Cinema With Onyeka Igwe October 5th–November 2nd, £150 Led by artist-filmmaker Onyeka Igwe, this course is for artists and filmmakers interested in using archival material in their work, and for scholars interested in probing further into the archival turn in non-fiction filmmaking.

Within and beyond reality With Ludovica Fales October 7th–November 11th, £150

1 12

This course explores forms of representations, challenging the documentary/fiction divide. Far from being just a contemporary phenomenon, the blurring of these forms— documentary and fictional narrative—is a creative and interpretive challenge that filmmakers have been concerned with since the early days of cinema.

At Open City Documentary Festival, we take public safety seriously and will be closely following government guidelines regarding COVID-19. Should there be a change in guidance, we will adapt the festival accordingly.

All information is correct at the time of going to press. Please check our website and sign up to our newsletter for the most up to date information. www.opencitylondon.com

Open City Documentary Festival creates an open space in London to nurture and champion the art of non-fiction cinema.

We aim to challenge and expand the idea of documentary in all its forms.

Alongside our screening programme, we bring together filmmakers and other practitioners to explore and debate the current landscape of documentary.