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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.