Tuesday 26 June 2012

Open City 2012 Curtains Down

What a pleasure it has been to have had over 130 films over four days in our second year. 
AV Hill Cinema Photo: Gloria Lin

Festival Hub, torrington Place Photo: Gloria Lin

The 2012 Open City Docs Fest was an awesome success. Thanks to the faith of the audience and ordinary wanderers in, by trusting and just going with the spirit of adventure in the programming that Ollie Wright, Lisya Yafet and Treasa O'Brien took. It introduced documentary as cinema, as art and performance and the possibilities that spiral out of engaging documentaries as a serious and rich category that challenges  itself as an artistic form as well as engaging new and wider audiences.
Grand Jury Chair Nicolas Philibert announcing Open City's 2012 Winner of the Grand Jury Award. Photo: Gloria Lin
























    

As a genre that pushes technological capabilities, documentary film-making tells stories in tandem with fast changing formats at a grassroots level. In the case of 5 Broken Cameras, 2012's winner of the Grand Jury Award, it became an analogy for the filmmaker's relationship to their camera in embodying the story in five episodes within their smashed up gear. We've seen some unbelievably aesthetically stunningly poetic films, with inventiveness which pushes docs into the realm of cinema, designed for singular justice on the big screen.
Award Ceremony 2012 Photo: Gloria Lin
We've seen the impact of Doc in A Day and MyStreet in inspiring would-be filmmakers and the next generation and moving the goalposts of access to filmmaking. This initiative which runs year round for regular people who want to make work about their localities, put their film on an online platform for public access. Judging by the kitted-out, mini-me film crews running around with unbridled smiles from our South London Schools, perhaps we're changing  a little of how stories are told  -and what we expect a filmmaker to look like. MyStreet was looked after by the Mystreet Team Olivia Bellas and Steph Patten who also made the festival sonically stimulating.
Designer Anthony Jones logs onto MyStreet   Photo: Gloria Lin
Highlights included the Il Capo Re-scored (triple-scored?) in the Cinema Tent with an epic Ennio Morricone-style rampage with live strings and electric guitar in contrast to Strangelove's minimal, zero low-end electronica reverie. Open City is the only place where you'll get a cognitive neuroscientist explaining syntheathesia in film music with the film composer for Steve McQueen's 'Shame' - on the same panel as Anil K, Imogen Heap's crocodile-clip customised guitarist-cum-choirmaster.

Elvis is still in the building         Photo: Gloria Lin
 The joy of having a dedicated documentary film festival which is non-industry and geared towards getting people into making film and watching collectively has always been the brainchild of Dr Michael Stewart who founded and established the whole festival . Filmmakers mentioned how they felt freer to engage in open dialogues with their audience, often leading onto bigger questions as their raison-d'etre of being here, with post-film discussion spiralling way beyond alloted times. This was seen so evidently in Jessie Teggin's efforts in bringing together some incredibly dynamic panels, meshing people from different disciplines, practices and professions to give shades of grey to informed opinions on difficult social matters.
The queue for our Closing Gala feature documentary, McCullin by Jacqui Morris Photo: Gloria Lin
Amidst the Closing Gala order/panic Sabrina Dridje kept the show on the road and production managed everything to Volume 11, Gail Cohen brought her extensive BFI expertise to get the message and philosophy out there, with Talia Cohen giving a beautiful performance in the Festival Hub. Amber Dobinson owned the marketing of the festival and is the reason you got the links and the news. Josefeen Foxter was responsible for pretty much winning the best sartorial style and hair category, as well as looking after the insanely hardworking crew of Open City Docs Fest volunteers whose time and efforts are quantified in innumerable ways.
Cinema Tent midnight take down or 'Open city: The Play' Photo: Gloria Lin
Aine Cassidy rocked the design and look of all our brochures, sites and graphics. And Paul at thedodjocreative.com, if not for whom this site could not exist. Jacob Harbord dealt with crazy volumes of requests from moi for comps and looked after our box office again. Bert Hunger was our technical manager and the man in black who made the pictures happen.

Other amazing quotes from some of 2012's travelling filmmakers: Simone Casanova made The Strawberry Tree in 20 days by roaming around by himself in Cuba. He is currently blending fact and fiction in Rome.
Simone Casanova of A Strawberry Tree (left) in a sodium light halo
Steve Maing l does not like New York City cockroaches that crawl like brown prawns inside his shoes. Gwanelle Gobe can speak Chinese and can moonwalk. (See below).
Filmmaker Gwanelle Gobe (right) is simply excellent at rocking these MJ moves Photo: Gloria Lin
Adam Isenberg has an extensive background as a Catalan linguist, has an almost analogue soul with an enviable 1st generation Nokia, loves painful Turkish Youtube comedy. Despite these things, A Life Without Words was one of the most transformatively poetic films of this year.

Lights up, Light down, Open City Docs Fest Photo: Gloria Lin
So here we are at the end. We're waltzing away, but we're not going far. .....See you in at Open City Docs Fest 2013.

Email us at Open City, for an Open relationship: info@opencitylondon.com   Ta ra for now.

Sunday 24 June 2012

Open City Docs Fest: Thus Far.. Join us for Final Day Films!


 Your Story Told through Film, MyStreet Screening, films made by MyStreet Photo: Gloria 
Its our last day!  Open City is privileged to have an engaged, enquiring and curious audience, plunging head first into new worlds. Yesterday's highlights included Punk In Africa which sold out to all of London's old-school scene, absolutely delighting Director Keith Jones. Evolution of Violence on Guatemalan daily brutalities was standing room only. Mark Le Fanu with the Guardian and Sight and Sound had high praise for the Wajda School in Warsaw of three shorts including Piotr Berna's Papparazzi. Aesthetic Queeries was led by our producer and programmer (with a knack for entendre) in a screening of queer lives over at the ICA.
Director Steven Maing and Producer Trina Roderiguez of High Tech, Low Life Q&A
There have been great discussions, humble, intelligent and humourous by turns and I've learned a hell of a lot. I was lucky to drop in on Steve and Trina of High Tech, Low Life dealing with great Qs with great New York eloquence in response to their screening, which deals with the amorphous and ill-defined area of Chinese censorship inter-generationally. Through the eyes of two bloggers who connive (via blogging in the voice of a cat to evade authority) they reach out to places where actual legal terms don't seem to be known by anyone. They made this film over 4 years dealing with over 500 hours of footage (with 100 generated by the bloggers). China under brief scrutiny, appears a adolescent conundrum of post-modern, post-communist ideological practice.

The programming this year, by a ceaseless Mr Oliver Wright has been so excellent that rounds of re-screening have been requested on our final day! Most films on this final day at Open City Docs Fest are still bookable online and in person at our Box Office on Torrington Place WC1E 6EQ. All films are on THIS PAGE. Do it now before you kick yourself for having slept through Open City in 2012.

Some films to check out, Gwanelle Gobe's 'This Space Available' looks at how advertising permeates our public spaces - and what can we do do de-saturate our streets of images and adverts that sell us stuff? She examines the arguments and approaches of street artists, activists and politicians around the world who are fighting to “reclaim the streets” from advertisers. Join in and reserve your space here.
Eggs For Later is a personal documentary about 
Marieke Schellart, the director who is in her mid 30s and wants to have children, though not having found the right guy yet. This is about fertility technology and perhaps, a meditation of what time can mean. Your Eggs for Later are here.


Living a stone's throw from London's first market street to be lit by electricity in 1880, Brixton's Electric Avenue, its easy to forget how this revoluntionised  every aspect of modern life. Jerome le Maire's doc, Tea or Electricity tells the epic story of an isolated village in the Moroccan High atlas going through this process over three years and the changes it makes in the face of modernity. Along electric lines, Chris Paine's Revenge of The Electric Car charts the race of General Motors, Nissan, and Tesla Motors to make the electric car. Thought provoking in how our desire for autonomy might deal with its costs.

Volker Sattel's Under Control has its London Premiere, giving us a tour of Germany's nuclear power plants and the story of the German atomic age. It explores the convoluted and site specific islands of growth and its prisms of places and sites. Get your tickets here.

The Open City Bar, a popular destination for the discerning doc fest goer  Photo: Gloria Lin

Agonizing over film schedule in front of The ARUP cinema in the Festival Hub Photo: Gloria Lin
A Preview of the feature documentary McCullin will be closing the Gala tomorrow at 6pm. I was moved by the rough cut, and unexpectedly unsettled again upon each viewing when I working on it as a production manager earlier this year. The sheer power of Don McCullin's photographs carry an intensity and format much copied now. I was 19 when I arrived at his work as an Eat Asian politics student through Horst Faas, the Magnum coterie of Capa, Riboud and Larry Burrows etc. Though, with McCullin, the ethics, feelings and cost of documenting human conflict resonated differently, perhaps on a biblical level through certain images.
This is a doc which is very straightforward. Covering his early years in deprived London, shot on 16mm with natural light, Alex Baranowski, fresh from a double Olivier award nomination scored the film, a brilliant dude in all senses of the word creates something haunting in accompanying the images.  A testimony carried by a reflection; the things  he as saw as a man - and the things he saw as a photographer.

 The film examines the golden era of photo-essays and adventurous journalism on the Sunday Times, Don McCullin had a creative freedom backed by Sir Harold Evans of the Times to bring back the true costs of conflict of Cyprus, Vietnam, Cambodia, later prevented by Murdoch's ascension in media. McCullin would travel into the field with twenty rolls of film only, making each frame count. It meant something deeper, without the modern luxury of disposable digital frames. Something of the preciousness of decisions made at split second moments, as unrepeatable as in life.
 McCullin raises debate around the idea of a 'war' photographer and the issues of censorship, picture editing and interference present in so much of our media today. Within the context of the ongoing Levenson inquiry, it brings up the same themes and characters of Fleet Street in questioning the true freedom of our press.
[Please note MuCullin has now SOLD OUT]


There might be one more post from me after this, when you've joined us for a beer or three by the Cinema Tent. Hope to see you tomorrow.

Saturday 23 June 2012

Sound Waves and Day Two at Open City


Last night, we opened the Fest with an experimental edge befitting of Open City Docs Fest documentary adventure in performance, curating and programming. 

With Marina Abramavic's 40 year career documented by Mathew Akers continuing to move the hearts of skeptics, we created an expansion of cinema through the London Contemporary Voices live sonic performance to Ancarani's Il Capo (of which I feel glad to be a contributing female tenor). Day two of Open City Docs Fest saw frantic activity across all our festival sites, UK Shorts, Slade's Artist Moving Image taking honorable mentions. 
Plus, a packed out, standing-space only Cinema Tent for The Strawberry Tree which I mentioned in previous posts below, with Simone Casanova's camera dwelling on a languorous, poetic Cuban reverie.
The Strawberry Tree, Simone Canasnova, The Cinema Tent    Photo: Gloria Lin
 Sound Waves is Open City Docs Fest's strand that traverses the aural landscape, in a wide circumnavigation - including documentaries exploring FC Judd's experimental music and radio maniuplation of the 50s and 60s in Practical Electronica,  a symphonic doc by Tess Girard exploring the synchronicity of sound, a nurse meditating on the final pulses of a life to a theoretical mathematician citing scientific synchrony, an omnipresent, universal pulse emergent in A Simple Rhythm. 
 The horror of losing the ability to hear music if you are a dancer, music critic or pianist- is losing a language as well as a primary sense, Lindsay Dryden's of Lost and Sound asks if our ears, brains and selves could let music can find us again in these conditions.
 For more participation, coming up is the workshop The Sound of Documentary, in conjunction with the School of Sound with a panel of composers and directors on how aural sensation evokes half the story on film. This may get you to reconsider choices and whether we really ought to stick to editing to twee jangly pianos on all our short films.

I was moved beyond, well words in the AV Hill screening of Adam Isenberg's A Life Without Words on the universal need for a language. With patience and observation, we watch the painstaking process a deaf sign-language teacher (who is also deaf herself) teaching three intelligent, uneducated deaf children who have no spoken words, sentences or self-created 'home-signs'; for feelings or objects. She visits them again and again with picture cards. 

A Life Without Words
The girl resists, walking away, tortured with ambiguity in whether she wants public and private language - or not. We itch for progress. It didn't surprise me to hear others in the screening moved to crying at the end of this film. I thought about A Life Without Words in relation to Wittgenstein's basic philosophical conundrum. Here, certainly it presented the possible cruel reality of 'the limits of my language are the limits of my world'.

Aesthetically sensitive, with hand drawn fonts, humour, eye-rests of chickens, cows, dogs and the insane beauty of the Nicaraguan agri-landscape, the whole pace of it seemed to place the viewer in an intimate position of care - time taken to divine the thoughts and motives of people who seek understanding but cannot be understood, by a lack of tools to communicate.
Audio-typed by a 230wpm typist for the debate after A Life Without Words with the Director Adam Isenberg with Dr Greg, Linguistics Photo: Gloria Lin
 Adam Isenberg studied linguistics. A native of California, residing in Turkey and like myself, has an unplaced accent and vocabulary slightly at odds with a presumed background. Despite mutual fluency in English perhaps, how many times have we had to clarify, well what do you mean? This realm of exploring how words shape our existence lead the audience into an unexpectedly passionate discussion of voices, agency and signs. In particular, the challenges of how he dealt with filming deaf subjects and ethical consciousness in documentary filmmaking
 Steve Maing of High Tech Low Life observes 1am revelry  Photo: Gloria Lin
Continuing that theme of ethics is a workshop, “When I start a new film, the less I know about the subject, the better I feel. In other words, what guides me is my ignorance. What does it talk about? Sometimes I simply don’t know...” says Open City Docs Fest’s Grand Jury Nicolas Philibert, Director of Être et Avoir and Nénette and Open City 2012's Chair is a filmmaker whose approach is based on the ethical question of filming the Other. He examines subject distance and limits at a workshop here.
London Contemporary Voices, Il Capo Re-Scored, Yuri Ancarani
More than anything, we'd love for you to experience curiosity and change beyond the screen.
For those of you that missed the London Contemporary Voices' re-score of the poetic Italian doc, Il Capo, you can hear the sonic fantasia again on Sunday with other sound designers/composers who reworked the film to different emotional effect. Open City's audience are growing to love heavy-duty engineering docs. Join in the love affair here.

Thursday 21 June 2012

Tales of the City: Our Houses, Our Lives

Still from ‘The Games’, a film by Hilary Powell
Land of Promise (Paul Rotha, 1946) 
If it is true that most of the world's population will be living in cities, then how do we live together? How will we feel? What do buildings do to us? Do we notice? Open City Docs Fest is proud to showcase City Scope, our strand looking at architecture, social housing, responses to the Olympic 'dream', implications of past and future relationships to the environment of the created landscape
We've got the doc Night Shift by Timo Großpietsch looking at different professions toiling in the graveyard hour in Hamburg, Germany. Also, the UK Premiere of Xun Yu's doc looking at the personal story of Grandma Jiang facing the destruction of her home and a 2000 year old community in China to make way for a tourist theme park in The Vanishing Light .
Vanishing Light, Xun Yu
We also have Adam Kossoff's film, Made In Wolverhampton, a brave look at the town-as-subject and framed as a filmic letter from the Director to his girlfriend in Cuba.Via a 'dry voice-over', he explores the melancholia of change in its post-industrial identity. From the perspective of the flaneur, it piles up layers of humour, history and quotation to explore memory, space and image, taking in free-wheeling connections with Norton bikes, Ché Guevara, Poundland, Galileo and a dude who lives on a roundabout. Typically English, then. Put Wolverhampton in your mind's eye here.

Open City Docs opens tonight with mechanical diggers that read sign language in 'Il Capo'. We're gratified to continue this theme with magical diggers that dance with people at the London Premiere of Anotoine Viviani's doc, Institu. This is a poetic essay about urban space in Europe, depicting artistic eruptions; monumental, secret or magical, each trying to breathe life back and transform our city-eye view of mundane things into something radical. Secrets of beauty can be bought here.
here
It is all about cultural activist interventions at Open City HQ. We're awesomely glad to work with Fugitive Images to present 'Estate' about radical change at the Haggerston Estate, Hackney. This looks at community identity and public architecture and the 20th Century utopias of social housing planning. Imagined perfection from the past is always intriguing. Contributer Andrea Luka Zimmerman will present an illustrated talk. Imagine you are in Hackey .
Artists, writers, film makers, academics, photographers and activists intervene in the dominant discourse, language and images of regeneration and the Games. The Art of Dissent: Adventures in London’s Olympic State, edited by Hilary Powell and Isaac Marrero-Guillamón 
The minor sporting event London also seems to be hosting alongside Open City Docs Fest is also known as the Olympics. No shortage of controversy, the impact it has on the city is more than psycho-geographical. Curated by Hilary Powell this screening of films on Olympic regeneration project look at subversions of the site/dream following on from the book “The Art of Dissent: London’s Olympic State” (published June 2012). Get your ticket for front row dissent here.
Its hard to predict a London in 2062.  London 2062 - What is the House, What is the City of the Future?  will look particularly at the housing crisis. This includes a screening of Paul Rotha’s 1946 film Land of Promise. We'll have a screening and discussion with Mark Tewdwr Jones (The Bartlett, author of Urban reflections narratives of Place, Planning and Change), Lucy Musgrave (Director of Publica) and Patrick Russell (Senior Curator BFI). Promise us you'll be in London in 2062 here.

Monday 18 June 2012

Voices of Dissent: Protest Works

 Protest Works is Open City Doc Fest's programme which looks at the things we stand for and what we don't. What happens when we're moved, out of desire and need to do something about it.

Amongst our screenings is Rouge Parole, looking at the Arab Spring and what is said and not said in a popular revolution when a young man sets himself on fire, Tahrir 2011: The Good, The Bad and The Politician telling of the impact of one fateful day in Eygpt told by three directors. Land In Focus presents the fight for the right to education in Chile with a series across formats and years, examining Pinochet's legacy.
Syrian Docs screens films reflecting on the ongoing dialogue for an national conversation that seems to be getting harder by the minute. This includes A Flood in Baath Country (2003, 46’) by the late master of Syrian documentary, Omar Amiralay.
Tamer Ezzat, Ayten Amin, Amr Salama / 2011 / Egypt, France / 90’
 The Real Social Network bring us closer to the home of Open City. Over six months' of government cuts, filmmakers accessed backroom meetings of a group of London student hacktivists, as they occupied universities and shut down banks. This screening followed by short documentaries from the ensuing global Occupy movements and a participative discussion on DIY media, re(presentation) and agitprop.
August 17th 2011, Tottenham High Street, London
 A Spark From Tottenham bring us a 'live documentary' performance to reflect on the events of 17th August 2011 in a retail park in London sparked by the contentious death of a young man, unleashing uncontrolled crime and violence in cities around the UK, in cases both saddening and bizarre.
Two local artists from Tottenham - photographer and filmmaker Don Omope and rapper and performance poet Alim Kamara, use storytelling, poetry, images and music to document and communicate their experiences of that night. This is followed by a discussion and tickets are here.

High Tech, Low Life Stephen Maing / 2012 / USA / 86’
'High Tech, Low Life'  is about censorship and the reach of the inter-generational citizen voices in an age of connectivity.
Directed by Steven Maing a Korean-American NY-based filmmaker, we get a glimpse of a China that is dealing with compressed change making the nation's current cultural output and commentary fascinating. Its title borrows from a William Gibson trope of 'cyberpunk'; the use of rapidly advancing infomatics and technology to achieve autonomy and radical social change.
This may well be the fear of the Chinese state policy on dystopic censorship has been evolving uneasily under the international eye.

High Tech, Low Life Stephen Maing / 2012 / USA / 86’

Using suppression with a ham-fist to inelegantly deal with its more public artists and figures, it leaves people such as Zola, a young vegetable seller from Hunan province and Temple Tiger, an older blogger-by-bike in Steve Maing's film almost unscathed to reach out and document their stories.
Armed with with laptops, cell phones, and digital cameras they traverse the land as independent newsrooms, exploring the struggles of the hidden China deep within its countryside.

As the daughter of a human rights journalist who operated newswires in the region in the 80s and 90s, its an exciting look at how the ordinary Chinese citizens might now deal with personal and public change through self-broadcast now. China's digital generation do it by the grazing of fingertips on screen, not by anonymous fragments of paper hidden in missionary churches, as it was before.

This is one to watch, for a nation which hasn't even begun to leak its personal stories.

Buy tickets for this Saturday's screening here with a Director's Q&A.

Friday 15 June 2012

Eyes On...World Documentaries at Open City

Two sons investigate the disappearance of their railway policeman father in the Phillipines.  Inner-city Memphis student-footballers overcome massive odds to win the playoffs for the first time in 110 years. Media, liberty and corporate incest in America. Breaking down the walls in Vietnam's independent music scene.  The ghost of a hurricane-annihilated Cuban fishing village.

These are just some of the stories in our World Visions strand at Open City. Enquiry into the world beyond our geographical borders raises hard questions, about ourselves, the way we live and allows us to question and wonder at culture.

What do we do, see and hear?..When we have Punk In Africa?  As a scene that never dances far from its political roots, with movements in every country that still run on grassroots organisation - punk at its best is still made by angry youths who tear a hole in the wall with three chords. Director Keith Jones tries to lift a lid on it with his doc on the scene.
                                                            Punk In Africa
After the film premiere there will be a panel discussion hosted by South African ethnomusicologist Dr. Angela Impey (SOAS) featuring co-director Keith Jones as well as 1980s South African punk scene veterans Matthew Temple (Four Horsemen, Matsuli Music) and Sean Roe (Domestic Servants, Pantsulas). Michael Flek from the pioneering Durban bands Wild Youth and Gay Marines will also be in attendance. Buy tickets here now.

Beyond ideas of the nation state, we're proud to bring you the UK Premiere of  'Evolution of Violence', a look at hell on earth in Guatelmala. Despite its post civil war status, occasions of brutality are normalized by communities; villagers fight for a cemetery after a massacre, murder and violence as everyday occurrence. Fritz Ofner brings us a street-level view through the eyes of those who live within it. Tickets here.

Evolution of Violence, Fritz Ofner / 2011 / Austria / 77’  


Simone Rapisarda Casanova   2011 / Canada, Cuba, Italy / 71
"What a boring shot of the old lady grinding coffee," says an old woman with coffee beans.
Director Simon Casanova's p.o.v dream-like reverie is about the final days prior to the disappearance of a whole village in Cuba. With Casanova as a director very much in the picture, who makes no disguise of his filming, it lies between documentary, anthropology and reverie. This is a cinematic poem that shows the village of Juan Antonio, on the northeastern coast before its destruction less than a month after the shooting wrapped.
 Open City is proud to show this visual letter, as a unique and sensitive take on lives in Castro's domain.

Tickets await your dormant hands here.

Wednesday 13 June 2012

Experiments in Time: Artists' Documentaries

Hollis Frampton 'Nostalgia' 1971

Experimentation is at the heart of cinema and the reason it exists. The first films blurred the lines of documentary depiction in the creation of an artform in moving image.
Open City Docs Fest are proud to make space for the exploration of avant-garde. The Experiments in Time: Artists’ Documentary strand pushes boundaries of cinematic time, form and content, queer aesthetics and the challenge of documenting live performance.

  We celebrate the cross-section of 'L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel' in relation to film with six specially curated programmes. This includes:

Aesthetic Queeries with works investigating the psychology and recording of queer lives,  Elegies for Ideologies, of melancholia entwined with questions: what is left, of the political Left?

We're proud to work with The Slade School of Fine Arts' to screen the Emerging Artist Showcase,
which includes four short video works by artist Sehauan Roh entitled 'Buying Eggs in Korea, Fucking Chinese, Apple Jam, Pork/Fork' promising 'a view of London and Britain from the perspective of an outsider and through the filter of a bitter humour'.


Slade School of Fine Art, Emerging Artists Showcase
Faint / Marianna Simnett / 4'
A reflection upon personal and cultural memory
Postcards from Experimental Places brings us artists that examine journeys taken and imagined, This Immortal Life, in looking at performance and documents, and This is Called Moving: Real Time and Cinema Time. The artists work here in a Tarkovskian sense 'sculpting in time', experimenting with movement, montage, slow shots, found footage, reconstructions and deconstructions.

Tickets are available here.

If Chris Marker's La Jetee became a morbidly beautiful decomposing artist's diary, Hollis Frampton’s 38-minute 1971 film 'Nostalgia' would fit that spot. Black and white photographic stills of Hollis' early artworks are slowly burned on the element of a hot plate, with a commentary that connects the past to the present of each successive image read by artist Michael Snow.


Experimental filmmaker, Barbara Hammer
Also screening, is Barbara Hammer’s 'Audience'. Open City worked with the Tate Modern to bring together a Study Day event earlier in the year discussing the pioneering feminist filmmaker's body of work.

 Other highlights include: Phil Collins’ 'Marxism Today', Vivienne Dick’s 'Visibility Moderate', Peter Kubelka’s 'Our Trip to Africa', the late George Kuchar’s 'Mongroloid' and Youmna Chlala and Larissa Sansour’s 'Trespass the Salt.'

Friday 8 June 2012

Youth Day Programme: Participate!

The Youth Day Programme at Open City gives the tools of visual storytelling to young people.

  Schools working with us have been involved in film making at a grassroots level by engaging the public on knife crime, perceptions of area codes, slang and youth centres. Mentored by MyStreet professional filmmakers, secondary school students take to the street with Kodak Playtouch cameras to make a Doc in a Day, a high ask for even professionals.
Its about the issues that matter to young people, told in their voices and through their eyes.
We're proud to be screening docs made with the Poplar Grove Pupil's Referral Unit, Ernest Bevin College in Tooting, South London and the King's Corner Project amongst others.

Doc In A Day

Filmmakers with MyStreet's Doc In A Day
 Doc in a Day is part of MyStreet, a part of the year-round activities of Open City working with schools and young people to promote a true chance to have 'your story told through film' and given a public platform.

The results have been both serious and light-hearted and are available to view online here: MyStreet

Still pictures tell a thousand stories. Through participatory photography,  we're showcasing PhotoVoice's workshop to encourage positive social change. By providing support in technical know-how and stylistic guidance, the charity will be running with the theme 'Lookout London' focusing on young people's experiences of gangs and knife crime in the capital.

PhotoVoice

The participants’ work will be exhibited during the festival in the hub. Check out PhotoVoice's important work here: PhotoVoice

'My Child The Rioter' Olly Lambert / 2012 / UK / 60’

"I feel like I’ve lost my son. I’ve had to say goodbye to the person I thought I knew, and hello to the son I never knew I had.” - Liz Oppong, Pembury Estate 'My Child The Rioter'


Its been less than twelve months since London experienced riots that rocked the city, prompting a torrent of media analysis and attempts to uncover why.

 Olly Lambert's film 'My Child the Rioter' brings together families and individuals in the aftermath of Britain's summer of looting and arson.
It boils down to examining relationships beyond the soundbites and hard questions and conversations with young people and parents who together face up to the meaning of last summer's actions.
Originally conceived for the BBC Two's Wonderland.

Get tickets for the screening here. Followed by discussion with Director Olly Lambert and David and Fabiano Clark who feature in the film.

Tuesday 5 June 2012

Open City Docs Fest Press Launch 2012


 Building on on inaugural success of 2011, we're delighted to be working in partnership with inspiring and inspired cohorts in the form of individuals, distributors, agencies, festivals and organisations that help get the stories out there and told. If you'd like to participate, we'd love to start a conversation! Come off the sidelines and get in touch here.

 Festival Producer Treasa O'Brien, Photo: Gloria Lin

For 2012, our  festival jury will be chaired by director Nicolas Philibert
(César and European Film Awards Winner Être et Avoir)

Jurors include:

Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington
Marc Isaacs - BAFTA Winner (Lift, Men of the City)
Wojciech Marczewski- Filmmaker and co-director of the Andrzej Wajda Film School, Poland
Carol Morley - Filmmaker (Dreams of a Life)
Dave Calhoun (Film Editor, Time Out)
Oli Harbottle (Head of Distribution, Dogwoof)
David Price (Vice Provost, Research, UCL)
Olly Lambert (Journalist of the Year 2007, Director My Child the Rioter, 2012)
Susie Orbach – writer and psychoanalyst plus filmmaker John Akomfrah (The Nine Muses, Handsworth Songs).
 Festival Founder and Director, Michael Stewart, Photo: Gloria Lin

UK Premieres include Chinese director, Xun Yu’s The Vanishing Spring Light, Gwenaëlle Gobé’s This Space Available and Tunisian filmmaker Elyes Baccar's Rouge Parole. The Vanishing Spring Light is a film about a family's love and loss, obligation, attachment, guilt, transformation and destiny. This Space Available is influenced by the writing of the director's father, Marc Gobé and brings energy and urgency to stories of people around the world fighting to reclaim their public spaces from visual pollution. Baccar Films’ Rouge Parole, travelling from town to town showing a collective nationwide revolt against dictatorship in Tunisia.

This year’s festival has introduced a special strand of Artists’ Documentary, focusing on artists who push the boundaries of documentary aesthetics, including contemporary work and cult classics.

Open City Docs Fest Press Launch 2012 Photo: Gloria Lin

We'd like to especially thank UCL alumnus Christopher Nolan for his support and interest in moving image.

Save the Date for our Opening Gala!

We're opening Open City Docs Fest with a dynamic Gala event, traversing the boundaries of sound, art and documentary.. And we would love you to come along on the 21st June!

Our Gala screening includes Matthew Aker's film 'The Artist is Present' on the New York-based  Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic.
Filmed in 2010 around a landmark retrospective of her performance art, it includes Aker's documentation of her 700-hour long piece at MoMa (Museum of Modern Art, NY) and the embodied processes of her work, at times life-risking, raising questions of what is art. It includes new pieces that continue to explore the  themes of trust, endurance, pain, catharsis and danger present in four decades of her practice.
'The Artist is Present' goes on public release in the UK on July 4th through Dogwoof distribution.

Matthew Akers
2011 / USA / 105’
Still of Marina Abramovic and Matthew Akers in Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present

We are also pleased to present a live performance from the London Contemporary Voices, a contemporary choir originally conceived to support the Grammy-Award winning composer Imogen Heap with a performance pedigree that includes the Royal Albert Hall and the Poet's Church in Covent Garden. They will sing a specially composed piece of choral sound design for the documentary 'Il Capo'.

Filmed by Yuri Ancarani, it watches 'The Chief' - an Italian quarryman at work who guides diggers and heavy-duty machines using a language consisting solely of gestures and signs.
Rehearsals are sounding spectacular, with the full complement of soprano, alto, tenor and bass voices responding to moving image.

 2010, color, 35mm, 15'
  
London Contemporary Voices, Eaton Square

 Book your tickets now on the main page, or here: Gala Tickets.