Open City Documentary Festival - 2021 Report

Open City Documentary Festival

2021 Festival Report

The Art of Non-Fiction

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Overview

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 by providing a platform for emerging talent as well as established practitioners.

Following a successful digital iteration in 2020, the eleventh edition of the festival happened in a hybrid format in response to the phasing out of Covid-19 restrictions in the summer. After a year of cinema closures and absences, we wanted to emphasise presence – to bring films, audiences and filmmakers together again in the cinema, but to do so gradually and safely. Whilst all the events took place in person, a fully captioned viewing platform made a selection of the festival programme accessible to non-fiction audiences throughout the UK. The festival took place in venues across London between 8th-14th September and online from the 13th to the 23rd. The eleventh edition of the festival featured screenings of international non-fiction film, both contemporary and historical, as well as audio, cross media, exhibitions, filmmaker Q&As, panels, workshops, networking and parties.

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Open City Documentary Festival 2021

7 days in person 11 days online 83 films 8 world premieres 27 UK premieres 6 first or second time features 25 countries 12 cross-media projects 12 talks & workshops 40 screenings in the cinema 5447 attendees 234 industry delegates 50 press delegates 197 accredited students

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Sponsors & Partners

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Venues & Programme

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Venues

In 2021, the festival returned to its traditional venues in central London – Bertha DocHouse, Curzon Soho and the ICA – and established new partnerships with Genesis Cinema in the East and Ciné Lumière - Institut français and the Goethe-Institut in West London. The festival took place at a time when cinemas had not been long open after lockdown, and we wanted to facilitate the return of documentary audiences to in-person screenings by organising a city-wide festival.

Open City also partnered for the first time with Mimosa House, an independent non-profit gallery space in Holborn, to present Alia Syed’s exhibition Meta Incognita.

The festival’s Hub returned to the China Exchange with three floors of festival activity in the heart of Chinatown. The Festival Hub housed the Delegate Centre, Expanded Realities Exhibition, Talks & Workshops Event space as well as a cafe bar for social events.

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Programme — Overview

This year’s festival presented a carefully selected programme of international contemporary and retrospective non-fiction cinema with a continuing emphasis on experimentation within the form.

The programme consisted of 83 films including 45 contemporary feature-length and short works including new works by Onyeka Igwe, Simon Liu, Pablo Alvárez Mesa, Miko Revereza, Laida Lertxundi, Jessica Sarah Rinland, Anya Tsyrlina, Ana Vaz, Shireen Seno, Luke Fowler and Morgan Quaintance. The festival increased and enhanced its retrospective programming for 2021 presenting important, rarely screened historical works by filmmakers including Alia Syed, Renate Sami, Haneda Sumiko, Rubén Gámez, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.

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In audience feedback, 91 % of attendees rated the film screenings they attended as a 4 or 5 out of 5.

80% of audiences attended the festival because they wanted to see new films.

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Programme — In Focus : Alia Syed

The festival presented the first major UK retrospective of artist filmmaker Alia Syed. The programme comprised three screenings and the selected works spanned Syed’s career from the mid-1980s to the present day. The festival also partnered with Mimosa House to present Meta Incognita, an exhibition of three recent works by Alia Syed which reflect on architectures of control, colonialism and techniques of the body.

“Watching Alia Syed’s films, spun over four decades from the mid80s till today, motifs appear and reappear, haunting the screen.

Images and sounds layer and double before me.”

– Rebecca Jane Arthur

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Programme — In Focus : Renate Sami

The festival partnered with the Goethe-Institut to present a survey of German filmmaker and translator, Renate Sami, the first to be held in the UK. The retrospective took place at the Goethe-Institut London and presented audiences with the opportunity to see a number of rarely screened works, most of them projected in 16mm and with live subtitling. Renate Sami was unable to travel to London but the programme was accompanied by the filmmaker’s friend and collaborator Ute Aurand, who also presented the world premiere of her film portrait of Renate Sami at the festival, and filmmakers Robert Beavers, Peter Todd and curator Ricardo Matos Cabo.

“Still lots of rich thoughts and emotions from the Renate Sami retrospective, for which many thanks.” – Audience member

“Being part of Open City was a great pleasure and we enjoyed Renate’s programs a lot in the relaxed Goethe cinema! Thanks again for showing Renate and bringing us over.”

– Ute Aurand & Robert Beavers

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Programme — Opening & Closing Night

The festival opened at Curzon Soho with the world festival premieres of Margaret Salmon’s Icarus (After Amelia) and Laida Lertxundi’s Inner Outer Space, with both filmmakers in attendance to present their films.

The festival closed at the ICA with a 16mm rare screening of James Benning’s Ten Skies. The film was presented in partnership with Fireflies Press and marked the official UK launch of Erika Balsom’s book about the film written for their series Decadent Editions.

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Programme — Other Highlights Tribute to Haneda Sumiko The festival hosted a screening in tribute to one of Japan’s most important documentary filmmakers, Haneda Sumiko. The screening included rare presentations of two of her early films A Women’s College in the Village (1957) and The Cherry Tree With Gray Blossoms (1977). In the context of the international symposium “Japanese Documentary Filmmaker Haneda Sumiko: Authorship and Gender Discourses”.

Rubén Gámez: Los murmullos + The Secret Formula This screening dedicated to the work of cult Mexican avant-garde filmmaker Rubén Gámez presented a rare opportunity to see his short films in the UK. The programme included Los murmullos (1976), a portrait of the abandoned agricultural community of Juchitepec and his iconic work The Secret Formula (1965), a surrealist cinematic essay exploring the myths of Mexican national identity that played a key role in the development of Mexican experimental cinema.

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Programme — Other Highlights In Dialogue: Luke Fowler & Morgan Quaintance This screening placed the work of two of the UK’s foremost artist filmmakers in dialogue for the first time. The programme comprised four recent film works, including the world festival premieres of Fowler’s For Dan (2021) and Quaintance’s A Human Certainty (2021), and the first public performance of Fowler’s new sound piece Listening in a place (Heartlandscape Orkney) produced from sounds, music and poetry found in Margaret Tait’s archive. The programme was followed by an extended on-stage conversation with the artists and Festival Director, Maria Palacios Cruz.

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The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) One of the most-highly anticipated films of 2020 finally had its UK premiere during Open City Documentary Festival. C. W. Winter and Anders Edström’s epic feature (480 minutes) was screened throughout an entire day at the ICA, followed by an in-depth conversation with both filmmakers led by curator and filmmaker George Clark.

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Programme — Talks & Workshops

The 2021 Talks programme was devised in collaboration with organisations including LUX, not/nowhere, the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Slade School of Fine Arts, which celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2021/2022. Across the programme there were over 60 speakers sharing their insights and experience. Featured filmmakers including Luke Fowler, Onyeka Igwe, Hope Strickland and Alia Syed led masterclasses and workshops at the Festival Hub. The launch of a special issue of MIRAJ (Moving Image Review & Art Journal) on Artists’ Moving Image, Isolation and Covid-19 provided testimonies to the experience of the past year, whilst the panel The Return to the City reflected upon the extremis of London in lockdown, imagining new possibilities of how we might choose to reinhabit the city space. A prototype for a KA3, a re-imagining of the Kugel Auditorium by artists Ed Cooke and Merijn Royaards, was showcased as part of the event.

“I was worried the somewhat awkward way of even getting inside the dome would put people off, but it really didn’t, and it seems there’s something irresistible about the object; it’s a head-turner and people want to experience it.” – Merijn Royaards

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Programme — Talks & Workshops The Critics Workshop developed with the Another Gaze editorial team offered an intensive introduction to the ethics and methodologies of feminist film criticism for 12 selected participants.

Convened by Erika Balsom and Elena Gorfinkel, a day-long event On Film Writing: Forms and Histories was devoted to the practice of writing about cinema, with readings and panel discussions.

A number of workshops aimed to provide practical, DIY solutions for young and independent filmmakers. Organising a Film Tour (led by filmmakers Lucy Parker & Ed Webb-Ingall) considered the practicalities and possibilities of self-organising independent film tours of community spaces, meeting halls and cinemas. More than a circle of chairs: A collaborative video workshop (with Ed Webb-Ingall and Jasmine Johnson) experimented with different techniques and methods to record a variety of group formations.

Artists’ workers co-operative not/nowhere offered one-to-one writing surgeries. Project Bootcamp (for those that don’t have time), organised in partnership with LUX, was a single afternoon accelerated workshop for filmmakers and artists working with film, looking at production, distribution and project development.

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Programme — Talks & Workshops

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“Thanks so much for inviting me to speak last week, it was such a stimulating morning.”

– Critics workshop speaker

“Thanks very much for organising the panel, it was great to have a cross generational discussion like that.”

– Panel speaker

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Programme — UCL Based at the UCL Centre for Public Anthropology, Open City Documentary Festival is embedded in the UCL community, working closely with colleagues across various departments. Almost 200 accredited students attended the festival in 2021, which featured a panel organised by the Bartlett School of Architecture and a reading group convened by filmmaker and Anthropology PhD student Hope Strickland.

The 2021 festival also served to launch the Slade 150 programme – marking 150 years of fine art teaching and research at UCL – with two screenings and a panel discussion. A selection of outstanding film and moving image work made by recent students from the Slade was presented at Ciné Lumière. No Film Is An Island, hosted by researchers Prof. Brighid Lowe and critic Henry K. Miller, explored what happened when the Slade became home to Britain’s first ever university film department through an evening of rare films and presentations at the Goethe-Institut. A panel of Film & Pedagogy brought together several generations of Slade graduates to debate changes in moving image production and its impact on filmmaking and teaching over the decades.

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Programme — Expanded Realities

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6 days, 12 works, 14 countries Our Expanded Realities Programme was presented as an exhibition within our festival hub that was free and open to the public. The exhibition celebrated digital art, interactivity and immersive technology in the realm of non-fiction with 12 works from around the world, including countries such as Austria, Argentina, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Israel, Indonesia, Japan, and the UK.

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Online Programme

A selection of films from the Open City Documentary Festival 2021 programme were available to watch online (UK only) from 13th – 23rd September.

Films in a foreign language had subtitles and all films were also available to view with SDH/captions for D/deaf audiences. Filmmaker Q&As also had SDH/captions for D/deaf audiences. We worked together with Matchbox Cineclub, an independent exhibitor specialising in access provision for film exhibition & distribution, in order to offer a fully captioned online platform.

All online screenings were accompanied by pre-recorded filmmaker Q&As, hosted by Open City programmers (María Palacios Cruz, Oliver Wright) and programme advisors (Jonathan Ali, Jesse Cumming, Carmen Gray, Anjana Janardhan, Emily Wright), as well as independent curators, writers and programmers such as Karen Alexander, Laura Allsop, Matthew Barrington, Pablo La Parra, Steffanie Ling, Olivier Marboeuf, Aily Nash, Shireen Seno, Genevieve Yue.

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Awards

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Awards

The festival presented 4 awards: UK Short Film Award, International Short Film Award, Emerging Filmmaker, and Open City Award. Each award was decided by a jury of key figures in the world of documentary, who attended a deliberation in London.

UK Short Film Award (supported by the British Council) & International Short Film Award Jury Adam Pugh Clive Nwonka Maeve Brennan Qila Gill Emerging Filmmaker & Open City Award Jury Elena Gorfinkel Hyun Jin Cho Lucy Parker Matthew Barrington Sonali Joshi

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Awards

UK Short Film Award (supported by the British Council)

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Winner: Surviving You, Always dir. Morgan Quaintance (2020)

Jury Statement: The complexity shown in Surviving You, Always by Morgan Quaintance haunts the reverie of youth and romance as it simplifies and complicates the textuality of time, memory, and intimacy. Unfolding from something playful as he marshals in the personal voice into a more sombre note, we were all hypnotised by his intelligence to create a heavily layered piece while still remaining democratic throughout.

International Short Film Award

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Winner: Letter From Your Far-Off Country dir. Suneil Sanzgiri (2020) Jury Statement: Our fascination with Suneil Sanzgiri’s Letter From Your Far-Off Country lies in his mysterious way of assembling and un-silencing a muted history in a complex visual syntax based on narrative, continuity, and realism. In displacing the formality of film, it subverts the physicality of individualism and affectively remains to be a collective voice. It is really exciting to see a work that transcends spatial logic as it derives a new index for what the art of non-fiction could be.

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Awards

Emerging Filmmaker Award

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Winner: Lost Course dir. Jill Li (2019)

Jury Statement: The Emerging Filmmaker award goes to Jill Li for her extraordinary and formidable testament to people’s struggles for governance in Lost Course. The jury recognizes the feat of its immersive, temporally intensive, and operatic exploration of uprisings and their longue durée as it considers the multifaceted workings of movements of resistance to corruption in Wukan. The film exposes the complex ways that public protest, social bonds and collective aspirations are made, held, and also broken with great sensitivity and urgency.

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Joint Winners: Icarus (After Amelia) dir. Margaret Salmon (2021) & After the Crossing dir. Joël Richmond Mathieu Akafou (2019) Jury Statement: Both films tackled vitally important subjects with a great deal of empathy and reflected nuanced approaches to their respective topics whilst showcasing a mastery of their respective forms, which we felt fit in with the vision for the festival and pushed at the boundaries of the documentary form.

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Guests, Sponsors & Partners, Audience

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Guests

Continuing our commitment to bringing filmmakers from around the world to present their work to London audiences, we navigated complex Covid-19 travel restrictions to ensure that as many guests were able to attend the festival as possible. Filmmakers travelled to London from Belgium, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland as well as from across the UK. Despite the travel restrictions, 59% of screenings had a filmmaker present for the Q&A. Where guests were unable to travel, we invited them to participate in pre-recorded online Q&As which were made available to audiences via the festival’s online screening platform.

“Thank you all so much for everything! I had an amazing time. Thank you for all the efforts to bring me there.” – Laida Lerxtundi “I can only be forever grateful for the opportunity to participate in the festival. Thank you for being a festival of an incredible cinematographic level. But above all, and this for me is the most important thing, thank you for the high human and political value and for the sensitivity and affection received by all the people who make up this excellent team.” - Raúl Liarte

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Sponsors & Partners

In 2021, we worked with a number of cultural partners to support the festival in marketing the programme and in bringing international filmmakers to the UK. We were especially delighted to attend a dinner at the residence of Mr David Thonon, Chargé d’Affaires of Wallonia Brussels International, in honour of Brussels-based Senegalese-Mauritanian filmmaker Hamedine Kane.

Cultural partners included the Embassy of Sweden, The British Georgian Society, Institut Ramon Llull, Wallonie-Bruxelles International, the Swiss Embassy, the Japan Foundation and Instituto Cervantes.

In-kind sponsors included Bodega Bay and Brixton Brewery, who provided drinks at our daily happy hours, 5th Season, who provided snacks to delegates, and True Story, who offered delegates a discount to their non-fiction streaming platform.

The Colombian Coffee Company also returned to our Festival Hub, serving up coffees, teas and snacks to our festival attendees.

“I really appreciated the overall feel of the festival and the nice touches such as the free bag of coffee!” – Adam Pugh, Juror

Fem ale

56% female 41% male 3% other

Gender

46% of audience members at screenings work in the Film and Creative sectors and the second largest industry represented was Education (15%). 31% were in full or part-time education. 77% of audience members live in London with 15% coming from the UK outside London and the remaining 8% travelling internationally to attend.

Und er 2 5

Age

44

“Honestly couldn’t have dreamt of a better experience showing my film for the first time and returning to cinema in general.

Pure delight!” – Graeme Arnfield

4 65+ 6 55

le

45-5 4

29% of people said it was their first time at the cinema since the pandemic. 24% of people said they had been to the cinema 1-2 times since May 2021. 90% of people said they felt confident or mostly confident about returning to the cinema .

Ma

34

Over 5400 people attended the 2021 festival. 74% were attending Open City Documentary Festival for the first time. 43% of audience members intended to attend between 2-5 events at the festival.

35-

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Audience

25

-

18% Under 25 37% 25-34 19% 35-44 13% 45 – 54 7% 55-64 4% 65+

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Audience

“Thank you for the really pleasurable and illuminating time at the festival screenings and the writing workshop.”

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– Audience member

“Congratulations on such a rich experience, both in actual and virtual cinematic space.”

– Audience member

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Press & Marketing

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Press

The 2021 received press coverage in outlets including Time Out, The Londonist, AnOther Mag, the New Left Review, Another Gaze, Film Comment, The Film Magazine, Animus Magazine, Dreamcage, Realscreen, Latin American Bureau, Clyde Built Radio, Take One, XR Must.

Though the big tent film festivals are the ones that hoover up the most attention, discussion, and coverage, it’s the specialist festivals that harbour the best surprises. Open City Documentary Film Festival, based in London but operating in hybrid form for this year’s edition, focuses on non-fiction works that, by way of their experimental nature, unusual angle of approach, or audacity of form, often don’t receive distribution.

(Take One) Now in a hybrid online and in-person format, Open City Documentary Festival is one of the capital’s most diverse celebrations of non-fiction cinema. The great thing about non-fiction cinema is that its best stuff always leaves you knowing a bit more, thinking a little differently, seeing the world as an even more complex place than before.

(Time Out)

It seems fitting that James Benning’s Ten Skies was chosen as the closing film of this year’s Open City Documentary Festival. After more than a year of lockdowns, during which in-person events such as this screening were impossible, the spectators in attendance were reintroduced to the cinemagoing experience with a series of ten static shots of the sky, each lasting ten minutes, proving that watching nature in the outdoors and going to the movies were the two activities that the pandemic made us miss the most.

(Animus Magazine)

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Outreach Highlights

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Marketing & Audience Development

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Social Media Followers: Twitter: 16.7 K Instagram: 6.7K Facebook: 13.2 K Newsletter: 5.7K Combined Following: 42.3K

Monthly average impressions: Twitter: 194K Facebook: 455K Instagram: 134K

Website Traffic: Average monthly pageviews: 61K Average unique monthly visitors: 12.3 K

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2022 Festival

The 2022 edition of Open City Documentary Festival will take place between 7th–13th September at venues across London.

If you would like to get involved, please contact the festival team: María Palacios Cruz maria@opencitylondon.com

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Oliver Wright oliver@opencitylondon.com Lucy Wardley lucy@opencitylondon.com

Image credits: 2021 Festival pictures by Adam Pietraszewski, Jade Reynolds & festival volunteers.

opencitylondon.com @opencitydocs

Film stills from Surviving You, Always (Morgan Quaintance), Letter from Your Far Off-Country (Suneil Sanzgiri), Lost Course (Jill Li) and Icarus (After Amelia) (Margaret Salmon).

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