Welcome to a Spring edition of the Open City Documentary Festival. Now more than ever there is urgency to claim the cinema as a space of resistance, solidarity and community. The festival programme aims to highlight and celebrate the work and resilience of Palestinian artists, and to point to absences and erasures through their presence. There is never a single theme to an edition of Open City Documentary Festival, but the importance of bearing witness, of observation and documentation, is an invisible thread that binds together much of the programme this year.
From the Folk Memory Project to the Expanded Realities exhibition, to the grandmothers that Elena Gorfinkel eloquently posits as capable of materialising “history as lived, relayed, told and retold”, many works speak to the urgency of recovering and recording lost memories and hidden histories. That loss is poignantly felt in Stolen Film Imaginary, an event conceived by Saeed Taji Farouky to complement screenings of Palestinian militant cinema, in which invited guests narrate lost Palestinian works. He writes: “This is a cinema of absence and its corollary: the invincibility of longing and imagination.”
The 2024 edition is a collaborative effort involving guest programmers, collectives and organisations who have all contributed, including: Alchemy Film & Arts, Artists for Palestine, Cinenova, Doc Society, the Essay Film Festival, LUX, the New Black Film Collective, the Palestinian Sound Archive, Sisu and T A P E collective. Thanks also to Jonathan Ali’s long-standing commitment to showcase the work of Caribbean filmmakers in London, to present the work of Afro-Cuban filmmaker Nicolas Guillén Landrián in partnership with the Barbican and many more.
Open City Documentary Festival is both by and for the non-fiction community in London: “We feel grateful that whilst so many colleagues and like-minded organisations suffer threats or are being silenced, that we continue, for a 14th year, to be able to facilitate an environment in which we can gather for seven rich, intensive days, to watch existing films and dream future ones, but also to share, debate and learn from one another. If not to do this, what are festivals even for?”
Over the course of seven days from 24-30th April, 2024 there will be 161 new and retrospective films across the city, showing at the Barbican, Bertha DocHouse, CloseUp Film Centre, Genesis Cinema, the ICA, LUX, Tate Modern and Rich Mix, where the Festival Hub will be based.
For more: https://opencitylondon.com/2024-festival/programme/full-programme/
