Friday 28 June 2013

Screen Notes: Wrong Time Wrong Place

Our Screen Notes series allows a more in-depth discussion of the films that we are showing this year at Open City Docs Fest. Contributors from a variety of vantage points and fields including scientists, scholars and students have given their unique perspectives on the documentaries they've enjoyed, sharing their expertise and experiences to add an extra dimension to the documentaries.

Wrong Time Wrong Place

Mark Le Fanu is director of film history at the European Film College in Denmark. Besides his interest in Japanese cinema, he is the author of a widely-acclaimed pioneer study of the Russian film-maker Tarkovsky (The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, BFI books), and is a frequent contributor to journals such as Sight & Sound and Positif.

Le Fanu has written about Wrong Time Wrong Place, a film by John Appel. Released in 2012, it was produced in the Netherlands and has a run time of 80'. Wrong Time Wrong Place was been nominated for our Open City Grand Jury Award.

Appel's film focuses on the massacre carried out by a lone gunman, Anders Behring Breivik on the island of Utøya in Norway in 2011. Instead of focusing on the perpetrator, Appel instead chooses to on the survivors and relatives of those who died. Several people caught up in the violence explain how their lives changed forever that day, including members of the families of victims and a man who had a chance meeting with Anders Breivik, the man later convicted of carrying out the attacks, on a ferry. Appel explores the senselessness of the tragedies on Utøya and our ability to cope with the absurd.

To read Le Fanu's piece, follow the link below: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2ELCplMBK2Qa2hKbE81ZE5CaU0/edit?usp=sharing

Thursday 27 June 2013

Festival Roundup: The Best of the Fest

Open City Docs Fest 2013 was our biggest and best festival yet! Over four days (20 - 23 June) we welcomed thousands of documentary fans and filmmakers into our venues around Bloomsbury and across London (including the ICA and Hackney Picturehouse) for the many events on our jam-packed programme.

A full house at The Bloomsbury Theatre

Festival highlights included:

  • A sell-out premiere of the tyre-screeching Baltimore bike gang documentary 12 O’Clock Boys at The Bloomsbury Theatre
  • The director’s cut of the film all doc-heads are talking about, The Act Of Killing, and a supremely popular masterclass on cinema and memory from its director Joshua Oppenheimer
  • The hotly-anticipated Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer documentary detailing the activists on trial
  • A closing gala screening of Cannes-award winning film Sofia’s Last Ambulance in partnership with Edinburgh International Film Festival.
  • A record of more than 7,000 tickets sold for events across the four-day festival

Our awards ceremony hosted on Sunday 23 June by Jeremy Irons celebrated the high quality of documentary cinema at Open City Docs, by selecting the crème de la crème of documentary talent for recognition. The winners of the Open City Docs Fest awards are as follows:

  • Grand Jury Award
  • Winner: Matthew’s Laws, directed by Marc Schmidt
    Special Mention: The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear, directed by Tinatin Gurchiani
  • Emerging International Filmmaker Award, sponsored by Aspall Cyder
  • Special mention: Wonder House, directed by Oonagh Kearney
    Winner: Karaoke Girl, directed by Visra Vichit Vadakan
  • Emerging UK Filmmaker Award, sponsored by The British Council
  • Winner: Black Out, directed by Eva Weber
  • Best City Film Award, sponsored by Publica
  • Winner: The Venice Syndrome, directed Andreas Pichler
  • Best Short Documentary Award, awarded by the London Short Film Festival
  • Winner: The Whistle, directed by Grezgorz Zariczny
    Special mention: FilmStripe, directed by John Blouin
  • MyStreet Awards, awarded by the Grand Jury
  • Winner: Richard, directed by Matt Hopkins 2nd prize: Niche in the Market, directed by Rod Main 3rd Prize: Blaenau, directed by Eira Wyn Jones

Michael Stewart, Open City Docs Fest Founding Director, agreed that the standard of this year’s films was incredibly high. And he was delighted that the audience’s appetites matched the films selected:

“We are thrilled that so many people turned up to watch films that they would never have the chance to see otherwise and then stayed behind to talk about them. It is hugely gratifying to hear from our jurors, our audience and the filmmakers that we are providing a place where they can come together to explore and celebrate the great art of documentary.”

What sets Open City Docs Fest apart from other documentary festivals is its emphasis on the live aspect of documentary. Documentaries take real life as their focus, and Open City Docs screens them to a live audience, as well as organising interactive panel discussions allowing the exchange of ideas from filmmaker to expert to audience. Live events are therefore a key feature of the festival, with Hamburg’s A Wall Is A Screen cinematic walking tours receiving rave reviews. These night time tours around secret locations weaving in and out of festival venues around London involve projecting a quirky selection of global short films onto the capital’s buildings under the light of a full moon.

You won't have to wait a whole year for the next Open City Docs Fest event, however. Not only do we run workshops and training programmes for budding filmmakers but we are hosting a screening of The Well at the Italian Cultural Institute on Wednesday 16 July in association with I Doc Italy. For more information and to book tickets click HERE.

Wednesday 26 June 2013

And the winner is... - Open City Docs finishes with an awards ceremony hosted by Jeremy Irons

Open City Docs Fest 2013 finished on Sunday evening with an awards ceremony hosted by Jeremy Irons. After four days of events, including film screenings, workshops, panel discussions, master classes amongst others, festival goers congregated in the Cinema Tent to hear Irons give the verdict on the award nominees.
Jeremy Irons at the award ceremony
As guests sipped on Aspall's Cuvée Chevalier or Beefeater Gin cocktails, Irons explained that he and his fellow jurors had faced some tough decisions. Open City Docs Fest's bold programming - covering a wide range of viewpoints and stories and exploring cinematic and political issues - had led to an extremely high standard of beautiful and thought-provoking films.
Jurors included:
  • Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum
  • BAFTA Award-winning director and producer Molly Dineen
  • Sundance Award-winning director Kim Longinotto
  • Emmy-winning director of digital documentary Highrise, Katerina Cizek
  • Producer of Into the Abyss, Andre Singer
  • Director Brian Hill (Secret History of Our Streets).

After detailing exactly what it was that separated the wheat from the chaff, and set an Open City Docs award-winning documentary apart from its rivals, Irons proclaimed Matthew's Laws, directed by filmmaker Marc Schmidt the winner of the Grand Jury Award.
Matthew's Laws
Award winners:
  • Grand Jury Award
  • Winner: Matthew’s Laws, directed by Marc Schmidt
  • Emerging International Filmmaker Award, sponsored by Aspall Cyder
  • Special mention: Wonder House, directed by Oonagh Kearney
    Winner: Karaoke Girl, directed by Visra Vichit Vadakan
  • Emerging UK Filmmaker Award, sponsored by The British Council
  • Winner: Black Out, directed by Eva Weber
  • Best City Film Award, sponsored by Publica
  • Winner: The Venice Syndrome, directed Andreas Pichler
  • Best Short Documentary Award, awarded by the London Short Film Festival
  • Winner: The Whistle, directed by Grezgorz Zariczny
    Special mention: FilmStripe, directed by John Blouin
  • MyStreet Awards, awarded by the Grand Jury
  • Winner: Richard, directed by Matt Hopkins
    2nd prize: Niche in the Market, directed by Rod Main
    3rd Prize: Blaenau, directed by Eira Wyn Jones

We at Open City Docs Fest would like to congratulate all the nominees and also give our thanks to our excellent juries.

Thursday 20 June 2013

Guest Post - Lost Rivers

The Thames isn’t the only water body flowing through London - its tributaries lie buried under layers of Victorian brick and concrete. Roads, buildings, and streams of vehicles and people move over them daily, unaware of the flux of life that moves underground. This film excavates these forgotten flows in major cities such as London, Brescia, Seoul, Toronto, and Montreal. Here, the film makes visible these unseen movements in contemporary city life, reclaimed and brought aboveground, as it were, by the network of people who are fascinated by the entrails of cities - people called ‘drainers’, urban outlaws who trespass in the name of exploration.

The film features interviews with these urban explorers, historians, city planners, amongst others, and it projects a sense of the growing importance for city dwellers to reconnect with the natural landscape that underlies all of our urban spaces. Here in London, as in other cities around the world, inhabitants are taking charge of their cities and visually reinserting history and nature into the urban fabric - which is precisely what filmmakers such as Bâcle achieve with a film like Lost Rivers.

Bâcle is based in Montreal, Canada, and is currently developing her second feature script with the support of SODEC and Telefilm Canada. She holds a BA (with distinction) in Communication Studies from Concordia University and recently completed the prestigious Masters program in Screenwriting and Producing at the University of Westminister Film School in London (UK).

Watch the trailer for Lost Rivers below:

Buy your tickets for the UK Premiere HERE. The screening is on Friday 21 June at 14:30 in conjunction with a panel discussion featuring the director Caroline Bâcle, Dave Webb (Environment Agency) and Danielle Plamondon (a Drain & Sewer Explorer), chaired by Karen Brown. Lost Rivers is screening as part of our City Stories strand, along with Grasp the Nettle, Tchoupitoulas, The Human Scale, and The Venice Syndrome.

This guest post is by Pei-Sze Chow, a current PhD student in Film Studies at University College London and one of our Screen Notes series contributors.

Wednesday 19 June 2013

Screen Notes: The Venice Syndrome

Our Screen Notes series allows a more in-depth discussion of the films that we are showing this year at Open City Docs Fest. Contributors from a variety of vantage points and fields including scientists, scholars and students have given their unique perspectives on the documentaries they've enjoyed, sharing their expertise and experiences to add an extra dimension to the documentaries.

Pei-Sze Chow is currently working for her PhD in Film Studies at University College London. Her research focuses on contemporary cinematic representations of landmark architecture and space in transnational regions and cities, particularly the Øresund and Berlin. She has published a chapter on the themes of authenticity and auteurship in Lars von Trier's Antichrist and currently serves as the Arts and Humanities Editor for UCL's all-faculty journal, Opticon1826.

Chow has focused on The Venice Syndrome, directed by Andreas Pichler and released in 2012. It was produced in Germany, Austria and Italy and has a run time of 80'. We're pleased to be screening the UK premiere of this thought-provoking film on Friday 21 June at 20:30, and it has been nominated for the Open City Docs Fest Best City Film Award.

The Venice Syndrome depicts the plight of a famously beautiful and romantic city. As monstrous cruise ships dominate the skyline, Venetian residents are forced out onto the mainland by rocketing rents and crumbling infrastructure. This illuminating film makes stark predictions for the future, warning that by 2030 perhaps no-one will actually live in one of the world’s best loved and most beautiful cities. Buy tickets HERE.

To read Chow's thoughts on The Venice Syndrome, please follow this link https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2ELCplMBK2QdFhSUWtjenI1TjQ/edit?usp=sharing

Tuesday 18 June 2013

Screen Notes: Do You Really Want To Know?

Our Screen Notes series allows a more in-depth discussion of the films that we are showing this year at Open City Docs Fest. Contributors from a variety of vantage points and fields including scientists, scholars and students have given their unique perspectives on the documentaries they've enjoyed, sharing their expertise and experiences to add an extra dimension to the documentaries.

Dr. Ed Wild is a Clinical Lecturer in Neurology at UCL Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, London, and an Honorary Specialist Registrar in Neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. Ed studied medicine at Cambridge University and has researched Huntington’s Disease for many years. Since 2009 he has been collaborating with Dr Jeff Carroll to make Huntington's Disease (HD) research news accessible to the global HD community.

Dr. Wild has written about Do You Really Want To Know? a documentary about Huntington's Disease, a genetic disease that is a incurable fatal combination of Alzheimer's, ALS and schizophrenia. Technological breakthroughs in HD research now mean that sufferers can be tested to predict their genetic future and prevent their children from inheriting the disease, but the decision to get tested is far from easy.

Directed by John Zaritsky and produced in Canada, the documentary was released in 2012 with a run time of 72'. Do You Really Want To Know? is being screened on Thursday 20 June at 18:45, and will be followed by a panel discussion with Charles Sabine (Broadcast Journalist & HDA Spokesperson), Prof. Sarah Tabrizi (Clinical Neurologist, UCL), and Bill Crowder (Head of Care Services, England & Wales, HDA). Buy tickets HERE.

Please follow the link to read Wild's article https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2ELCplMBK2QdHg2d25LWmhBTm8/edit?usp=sharing

Monday 17 June 2013

Screen Notes: The Act of Killing

Our Screen Notes series allows a more in-depth discussion of the films that we are showing this year at Open City Docs Fest. Contributors from a variety of vantage points and fields including scientists, scholars and students have given their unique perspectives on the documentaries they've enjoyed, sharing their expertise and experiences to add an extra dimension to the documentaries.

Our first issue is from Mark Le Fanu, director of film history at the European Film College in Denmark. Besides his interest in Japanese cinema, he is the author of a widely-acclaimed pioneer study of the Russian film-maker Tarkovsky (The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, BFI books), and is a frequent contributor to journals such as Sight & Sound and Positif.

Le Fanu has written about The Act Of Killing, which just won the Special Jury Award at the 20th Sheffield Doc/Fest last weekend. Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn and a filmmaker who has preferred to remain anonymous, the film was produced in Denmark, Norway, and the UK and released in 2012, with a run time of 159’. Nominated for the Open City Docs Grand Jury Award, The Act of Killing will be screened on Sat 22 June at 13:30 in the Bloomsbury Theatre, followed by a director Q&A session, for which you can buy tickets HERE.

In addition to the screening, director Joshua Oppenheimer will be hosting a Masterclass entitled Cinema and Memory on Saturday 22 June at 17:00 in which he will discuss the relationship between cinema, trauma and memory and trace the role of fiction in non-fiction and fantasy in reality within the documentary genre, providing an exclusive opportunity to access insights into one of the most thought-provoking documentaries of the year. Buy tickets HERE.

Please follow the link below to read Le Fanu's article. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2ELCplMBK2QOE9ZQzhQRUJLN0E/edit?usp=sharing

or for historical background information, by John T. Sidel, the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) please follow the link below: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2ELCplMBK2QUDFMQzBoSExqdXM/edit?usp=sharing

Monday 3 June 2013

"What it's like when money's tight" - Austerity on film

When life is tough, jobs are scarce, and money doesn’t go as far as it used to, how do people cope? With the recent release of Baz Luhrmann’s film version of The Great Gatsby, which depicts extravagant consumption prior to the Great Depression of 1930s America, there’s no better time to reflect on what it means to be ‘well-off’ or ‘poor’ in our current age of austerity.

Open City Docs Fest are thinking about what the economic decisions made by the people in power actually mean for our everyday lives. We’re showing three films that discuss how people cope with feeling the squeeze and what it’s like to come face to face with hardship: Iceland, Year Zero (Iceland), To The Wolf (Greece) and Jaywick Escapes (UK), the latter having the added bonus of super-affordable tickets starting from just £6.

Austerity is inescapable: you can’t go anywhere without reading a news story, Facebook post or Tweet about it. Certainly families and businesses are feeling the effects, with unemployment growing to 2.52 million in March according to ONS statistics. Economic crisis has been in the news for so long now that it’s hard to remember what it actually means for an economy to collapse. Iceland, Year Zero is an evocative depiction of the aftermath of the collapse of the three main Icelandic banks in 2008, which caused thousands of people to lose their jobs, their savings and their dreams. Sigorour Hallmar Magnusson and Armande Chollat-Namy's film provides a very human perspective on financial meltdown. Buy tickets HERE.

Today’s definition of austerity is primarily about constraining economic policies, coupled with the political vision that we need to get ‘back to basics’ and cut ‘frivolous’ spending. The recent Greek economic crisis is a case in point, as Greece’s high levels of national debt, in conjunction with low national income, meant that they had to accept a bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to save the country from going completely bankrupt. The bailout loan came with conditions, however, one of which was that the government had to introduce austerity measures to help balance the country’s books. Not only was the Greek economy in crisis, but life was only going to get tougher for the Greek people, as any cuts to public spending come at a price. Less public spending means less money for government-provided services such as welfare, healthcare, and education, all of which are needed more than ever when a country is in recession.

Get to grips with how austerity changes traditional ways of life forever, with our screening of To The Wolf by Christina Koutsospyrou and Aran Hughes which follows the lives of two shepherd families in a remote village high up in the Nafpaktia mountains. Combining documentary and fiction with an all-local cast, To the Wolf is both the reality and an unsettling allegory of today's Greece. Buy tickets HERE.

With the Greek economy as an alarming example, what’s happening closer to home? Only last week, UK Chancellor George Osborne decided to continue to cut public spending, in spite of the disapproval from the latest IMF report. Osborne’s cuts to benefits as detailed at length in the national press will affect many people across the country, and this clampdown on public spending prompts the question ‘are people’s livelihoods considered a needless expense?’ Economic recession and austerity measures affect certain areas and certain people more than others. New data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development suggests that the poor have been hit hardest by the financial crisis and cuts to welfare spending may increase inequality further. Here at Open City Docs Fest we’re looking at how people make the best of things and retain their livelihoods when times are hard. Jaywick Escapes is a moving study of what is officially Britain’s most deprived place. The Essex town of Jaywick promises sea views at bargain rents, and this film by Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope follows three newcomers who see Jaywick as a chance for a fresh start. Buy tickets HERE

Through our film screenings at Open City Docs we hope to explore what austerity and recession really mean to the people who are affected by it.