Open City Documentary Festival announced the full programme for its 15th edition

Open City Documentary Festival is excited to announce the full programme for its 15th edition, taking place in person from 6th to 11th May. The festival welcomes returning and new audiences to venues Barbican, Bertha DocHouse, Close-Up Film Centre, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Tate Modern and Rich Mix, where the Festival Hub will be based. Open City Documentary Festival 2025 will celebrate the art of non-fiction with 101 films and 4 Expanded Realities projects, from 21 different countries. The selection of new films includes 5 World Premieres, 16 UK Premieres, and 6 London Premieres. Works by women or nonbinary filmmakers, artists and female-led/queer collectives make up 58% of the programme. The Festival Hub will host the free Expanded Realities exhibition, a programme of films, talks, panels, special events and the festival party in collaboration with Sisu. The Land of Common Disgrace, a participatory project devised by Saeed Taji Farouky, will take place at Fishtank Workshop, with members of the public and participant/actors building a series of film sets together as a collective act of resistance against the arrest and prosecution of pro-Palestinian protesters in Britain.

FILM PROGRAMME HIGHLIGHTS

Screening as a prologue to Open City Documentary Festival is the UK premiere of exergue – on documenta 14, an episodic look behind the scenes of the institutional contemporary art world. Screening over three consecutive days, the film by Dimitris Athiridis follows artistic director Adam Szymczyk and his curatorial team over two years as they prepare documenta 14. The 15th edition opens with Siticulosa (Maeve Brennan, 2025), a film based on the artist’s multidisciplinary research which considers the relationship between archaeology, geology and agriculture in the Puglian landscape.  The festival includes Moving Statics, a retrospective of the works of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill curated by Audrey Lam and Keegan O’Connor. Over a period of fifty years, the Australian filmmaking couple sought to discover new visual languages and new ways of accessing and rendering landscape through the medium of 16mm film.  Jocelyne Saab’s Egypts, 1976–1989 consists of new restorations presented for the first time of six films made by the pioneering Lebanese director. The programme, curated by Elhum Shakerifar and Mathilde Rouxel, offers a slant insight into the evolution of Saab’s political perspectives over time, and of her enduring commitment to justice and freedom. Sanrizuka – Notes on a Struggle focuses on the rural area of Sanrizuka in Japan where a community of farmers and grassroots organisations joined in resistance to preserve their commons from 1966 and oppose the construction of a new airport. Organised by Ricardo Matos Cabo, the programme explores Sanrizuka through documentaries, archival footage, and documents spanning four decades, including rushes shot between 1968 and 1977 by Ogawa Productions, a filmmaking collective immersed in the struggle.  The programme Just Evidence, organised in conjunction with the publication of World Records, Volume 9: Just Evidence, examines forensic modes of investigation that have emerged as a dominant form of artist and activist media practice but can perpetuate the oppressive forms of social, legal, and factual authority that artists and activists are often struggling against. Featuring screenings, workshops highlighting the work of artists, filmmakers, and investigators who are interrogating, subverting, and rerouting forensic methods, it also includes a performance by Maxime Jean-Baptiste at Tate Modern as well as his debut featurelength work which will close the 2025 edition of the festival. Kouté vwa follows Melrick, a young teenage boy, as he spends a summer in French Guiana with his grandmother Nicole. The film traces conversations between Melrick and Nicole that reveal the tragic circumstances of the death of her son Lucas Diomar who was murdered 11 years earlier. 

WIDER PROGRAMME

The wider programme features a vast array of documentary filmmaking, talks, audio projects, workshops and performances. Stories that focus on community organising are at the heart of this edition. Rhea Storr returns to the festival with Okay Keskidee! Let Me See Inside (2024) a love letter to the UK Caribbean diaspora, exploring black communities, physical spaces and notions of community. It explores the closure of valued Afro-Caribbean spaces which has led to a severe lack of documentation of the past. Also returning with a river holds a perfect memory (2024), Hope Strickland’s film shifts between archival imagery of the industrialised Lancashire landscape and recent diaristic footage shot on Jamaican waterways. The audience bears witness to the reservoirs of memories, racialised histories and transformative labour practices. Notes From Brook House (Alex Nevill, 2025) showcases fragments of stories and words passed from one person to another. Through sharing stories from those held inside Brook House, a large immigration centre on London’s outskirts, the film examines migration, control, and the space between perception and reality. 

The organisation of cultural events is reflected on with At All Kosts (Joseph Hillel, 2024) in Port-au-Prince where the audience is invited to see how the arts play a vital role in the lives of the brave and spirited Haitian community. Against a backdrop of poverty, violence and fear, and interrupted by the sound of machine gun fire, an ensemble of actors and their determined artistic director rehearse for an upcoming festival. The feeling of togetherness is also palpable in Chetna Vora’s Oyoyo (1980) programmed by Emily Mason. Shot entirely within a student hall of residence in East Berlin, the film captures the relaxed energy of student life, featuring conversations with students from Chile, Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, and Mongolia. Living and studying alongside one another, we see them discuss their home countries, their experiences in the GDR, and their aspirations for the future. Making his directorial debut, Alexander Horwath’s Henry Fonda for President (2024) is an essay-film that proposes a history of the United States through the prism of the life and career of actor Henry Fonda, who famously played Abraham Lincoln and is perhaps best remembered as the juror with a conscience who pits reason against the prejudices of 11 others in Twelve Angry Men (1957). The Clock, or: 89 Minutes of “Free Time”, a programme of works from the vaults of the Austrian Film Museum curated by Howarth, represents a somewhat surreal – or childlike – attempt at telling a story of the 20th century. It is also an indirect tribute to Viennaborn Amos Vogel, founder of Cinema 16 in New York and all-round man of cinema. On Kino: the Afterlives of the Obsolete brings Guangzhou-based artist, filmmaker and publisher Qin Dao to London to present his self-initiated film theatre and moving image archive all maintained within his own living room.

His enigmatic A vampire film (2016) will also screen, a work that transcends celluloid, screen, and the social milieu of post-socialist China, while interrogating the nature of cinema.  3   In response to the latest, autobiographical film by the legendary British avant-garde filmmaker, the programme Being John Smith brings together four works that explore, in different ways, what it is to “be” John Smith, and will include the UK festival premiere of Being John Smith after screenings at festivals worldwide. Stories with a focus on ancestry and family include returning filmmaker Sally Lawton’s latest work Postpartum Film (2024). Lawton brings together elements of life from before and after giving birth, reflecting on the discontinuity of the adult world and childhood, and playing with duration and the subjective perception of the passage of time. Scent Line on a Moving Mountain (Eiko Soga, 2025) posits an exchange of knowledge and experience between an indigenous Ainu elder and the filmmaker during the early stages of her pregnancy whilst Unreachable Object (Fanfan Zhou, 2024) is a layered exploration of the performance of motherhood.  In collaboration with the Austrian Film Museum, VALIE EXPORT considers the career of one of the most radical audiovisual artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, whose work spans 16mm film, video, expanded cinema performances and digital art. The programme is a presentation of canonical and lesser-known films by the artist and coincides with the publication of a new book on VALIE EXPORT’s film and video works. A special screening of Voices from Gaza (Antonia Cacci and Maysoon Pachachi, 1989) and Palestine Will Win (Jean Pierre Olivier de Sardan, 1969) offers audiences an opportunity to reflect on the nature of solidarity and militancy in cinema today. Partition (Diana Allan, 2025) is a film project grounded in academic rigour that challenges the power of the archive and demonstrates how the displacement of Palestinians has extended far beyond the original Nakba of 1948. 

In The Diary of a Sky (2024), Lawrence Abu Hamdan focuses his “Private Ear” into analysing sonic data generated by the UN to chart the incessant noise pollution emanating from unauthorised Israeli plane and drone flights into Lebanese airspace. Manal Issa, 2024 (Elisabeth Subrin, 2025) revisits their previous collaboration, Maria Schneider, 1983 (2022), in which Lebanese-French actress Manal Issa reenacted a televised interview given by Maria Schneider, Elisabeth Subrin poses the same questions again on September 22, 2024, in Beirut. The launch of Open City’s Non-Fiction 07: The Elephant, guest edited by Elhum Shakerifar will provide a space to gather and listen in to the ideas at the heart of the journal. So Mayer and Jenny Clarke will discuss their pieces, and Barby Asante will lead a breathing workshop. Holding the potential of poetry and conversation close, the event also includes a screening of Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña’s short film What Is Poetry to You (1980). Also launching during the festival is the double issue of Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ). Film archivist Esther Harris reveals the intricate processes of restoring Lis Rhodes’ influential 1978 film Light Reading.

Curator and researcher Sophia Satchell-Baeza will discuss experimental film and psychedelic vision on the hippy trail, as portrayed in David Larcher’s epic and rarely seen 1975 travelogue Monkey’s Birthday. In collaboration with the Ian White Estate, Open City presents the fourth Ian White Lecture, given by writer Esther Kinsky. This ongoing series celebrates the provocative and enquiring spirit of artist, performer, curator, educator and writer Ian White (1971–2013).  Filmmakers Kevin Jerome Everson, Chiemi Shimada, Eva Giolo, Luke Fowler and Morgan Quaintance also return to the festival with their latest works whilst filmmakers screening at Open City for the first time include Armand Yervant Tufenkian, Corin Sworn, Christelle Oyiri, Eitan Efrat and Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Ewelina Rosinska, Lazare Lazarus, Malena Szlam, Mourad Ben Amor and Sam Drake.

EXPANDED REALTIES 

This year’s Expanded Realities Exhibition features an audio project, a 2-channel video installation, an automated laboratory performance and a lecture performance. Borderline Visible (2023) uses a book of images and text fragments which the reader is navigated through by an accompanying soundtrack that activates and reworks the non-linear publication. for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world (Gala Hernández López, 2024) proposes a speculative conversation with cryptographer Hal Finney, who was cryostatically frozen in 2014. This assembly of YouTube clips, home videos, 3D animations and other found footage reckons with the past, present and future of techno-utopian ideologies and their proponents.  Drinking Brecht is an interactive installation by Sister Sylvester which combines Bertolt Brecht’s theatrical practice and legacy with the scientific study of DNA to critique notions of purity and authorship. Returning In Focus artist Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Eyes That Shine at Night is a lecture-performance that will further explore the technologies used to make images of animals and the aesthetic and political implications of these forms of capture. 5   Notes to Editors About Open City Documentary Festival: Open City Documentary Festival creates an open space in London to nurture and champion the art of non-fiction cinema. Based at the UCL Anthropology, we deliver training programmes, an annual documentary festival, the bi-annual Non-Fiction journal, and events throughout the year.

Celebrating the art of non-fiction, Open City Documentary Festival aims to challenge and expand the idea of documentary in all its forms. Alongside our screening programme, we bring together filmmakers and other practitioners to explore and debate the current landscape of documentary. The festival takes place in person between 6 – 11 May 2025, and consists of international contemporary and retrospective non-fiction film, audio and cross media, as well as filmmaker Q&As, exhibitions, panels and workshops. https://www.opencitylondon.com Bluesky / Facebook / Instagram About Open City Documentary Festival 2025 film trailer: Niki Kohandel’s practice sits in the space between recording and rewriting a story. She works in collaboration with family members, friends and young people, playing with languages, analogue film, childhood memories and colours.  She is currently a Cubitt artist in residence at the Arts and Media School Islington, where she shares her story-telling practice with students through workshops, talks and paper boat making.  'A departure' begins with a question: how do we navigate on disappearing rivers, seas, sources, bodies of water endangered by neo-colonial extraction? The film responds to the call of Sohrab Sepehri's poem 'Beyond the Seas' and invites the viewers to build their own paper boat.