Open City Documentary Festival returns for its 14th year with the aim to challenge and expand the idea of documentary in all its forms. The festival consists of international contemporary and retrospective non-fiction film, audio and cross media, as well as filmmaker Q&As, exhibitions, panels and workshops.
Drawing upon Mark Fisher’s theorisation of the eerie as the sensation of absence, of either a presence or an absence, these works activate the dissonance between our imagined notion of the countryside and the political realities of this landscape.
The Soldier’s Lagoon(La Laguna del Soldado) is the second part in Pablo Álvarez-Mesa’s trilogy of films retracing Simón Bolívar’s passage during the Liberation Campaign of Colombia in 1819. Followed by Q&A with Pablo Álvarez-Mesa
Drawing from the writings and ideas of political philosopher Hannah Arendt, and particularly her focus on the human capacity to introduce something new into the world we share, Annik Leroy and Julie Morel travel across Europe, filming portraits of people and landscapes, gathering accounts of traumatic experiences that had been life-changing and transformative.
Curated by Simon Liu and featuring seven short films by Hong Kong artists spanning the last 45 years, Life as Usual surveys the often surreal and uncanny underbelly of life in the metropolis through gestures of disobedience, imaginary landscapes, and desires for an alternative future.
The Sojourn imagines a restless landscape film in Taiwan. Visiting scenic locations shot by King Hu, the short experiments with the road movie genre and its intersection with the martial arts epic. / A Stone’s Throw: Amine, a twice-exiled Palestinian elder, becomes a figure around whom AlSalah unravels the recurring violence of oil and labour extraction.
Like Chantal Akerman (D’Est) and Barbara Hammer (My Babushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities) Naomi Uman was drawn to return to the Eastern Europe of her great grandparents, in an act of reverse pilgrimage. Introduced by Elena Gorfinkel
With nods toward classic Hollywood and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Decision to Leave is an essential masterwork from the legendary Park Chan-wook, infused with elegance, ingenuity and a razor-sharp precision.
One of the most influential political films in history, The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s.
“I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick”. We're thrilled to present 8 films by one of the most influential figures in American avant-garde cinema, Maya Deren
The Lock-In never ends. Consisting entirely of pub footage from the British soap opera EastEnders, it is endless inasmuch as its source is endless and its makers living.