Saturday's Films at the One World Media Festival

After the recent Lampedusa boat disaster - where over 300 immigrants lost their lives when their vessel capsized in waters between Eritrea and Italy - the subject of the perilous dangers of migration has once again been forefronted in the European public’s consciousness.

The topic will be addressed through a daylong film programme at the inaugural One World Media Festival, to be held at UCL in association with Open City Docs. The free two-day festival focuses on global media and human rights issues, with keynote sessions, panel discussions and selection of film screenings from around the globe. Taking up from the theme of global conversations between the ‘North’ and ‘South’, Saturday’s film programme will explore the media’s treatment of migration especially asylum seekers. How does Europe deal with human rights issues that are closer to home?

One of the films to most directly address the mooted topic will be Closed Sea (Mare Chiuso). From directors Andrea Segre & Stefano Liberti, the documentary takes a close look at those making the treacherous journey from Northern Africa across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy. The passage is fraught with considerable danger and no guarantee of any reward upon arrival due to Italy’s ‘push-back policy’. This legislature, an agreement signed between former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and now deceased Libyan ruler Colonel Gaddafi, denotes that to control the flow of migration, those intercepted at sea are sent back to Libya, facing persecution upon their return.

Later in the day, Special Flight (Vol special) documents a further angle on the subject matter; the harsh treatment of migrants scheduled for deportation. The film takes place in Switzerland where, if those earmarked to be deported fail to cooperate, they are forced to take a titular ‘special flight’ in less than pleasant conditions to their native countries.

While documentary is a direct and often penetrative way to address such underseen and volatile subject matter, it should be noted that it is not the only method at a filmmaker’s disposal. Supporting this ideal is Saturday’s exciting double-bill of animated short 1000 Voices and feature drama Leave to Remain.

The former is a ten-minute long animation about the UK’s policy of indefinite detention for asylum seekers. Evocative and striking imagery is accompanied by real phone calls made by detainees from inside their holding cells, and the effect is potent and emotive for the viewer.

Leave to Remain is a first feature from director Bruce Goodison. Starring Toby Jones as a teacher working with teenage asylum seekers who are fleeing their conflict-ravaged homelands, the film is an impressive meditation on the ambiguities and difficulties facing young people who enter the immigration system in the UK.

Both films prove that you can encourage just as much of a reaction from audiences using fiction or impressionistic imagery as you can with documentary. 

The cumulative impact of the Saturday programme at the One World Media Festival is a thought-provoking blend of discussion topics and creative filmmaking from a slate of talented directors. For those who believe that cinema and activism are two branches of the same tree, it’s an event that will provide a satisfying balance of debate and art.

This post is by Tom Grater, who has a wonderful documentary blog you can check out here.

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

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.

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.

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:

Lost Rivers - OFFICIAL TRAILER from Catbird Productions on Vimeo

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.

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

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