September 6–12, 2023
Open City Documentary Festival 2023 will celebrate the art of non-fiction with 93 films and 12 Expanded Realities projects.
The Festival Hub in Chinatown will host the free Expanded Realities exhibition and a programme of talks and workshops, as well as daily happy hour (and a half) social events.
The 13th edition opens with Nowhere Near (Miko Revereza, 2023), a poetic essay film that traces the filmmaker’s decision to leave the United States and return to the Philippines.
Once more, the festival features two In Focus programmes with filmmaker Mary Helena Clark and artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley. Whether working with 16mm film, video or installation, with found footage or her own images, Clark uses the language of collage in order to bring together disparate sounds, images and text that suggest an exterior logic or code, a puzzle to be solved, a mystery to be cracked. In Focus: Mary Helena Clark is the first UK survey of her work.
In Focus: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley presents three recent works by the artist and marks not only the first retrospective programme of her work, but the first time an Expanded Realities artist has been the subject of an In Focus programme at the festival. Brathwaite-Shirley uses a range of digital tools, particularly early 3D game engines, animation, performance and print in her work.
No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image is dedicated to works of non-fiction that invent new languages for the representation of gendered experience. Curated by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg, Open City will be presenting a five-programme selection that celebrates the heterogeneity of feminist non-fiction, generating a fragmentary atlas that maps divergent positionalities.
Curated by Shai Heredia, founding director of Experimenta India, The Invisible Self is a programme of feminist films made between 1985-1991 that journeys through the lives of women who challenged traditional patriarchal structures in India.
One of North America’s largest and most important university-based motion picture collections, Harvard Film Archive, is collaborating with Open City on a number of programmes for the 2023 edition. Curated by Haden Guest, SMALL WORLDS. AVANT-GARDE DOCUMENTARIES FROM THE HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE interweaves distinct yet complementary modes of avant-garde non-fiction cinema made by independent artists.
Dóra Maurer’s rarely screened and newly digitised Hétproba (Seven Trials, 1982) will show at Tate Modern, following an exhibition of her work in 2019-2021. Maurer employs a range of cinematic strategies in this intimate portrayal of an opera singer and her four teenage children.
The Non-Aligned Film Archives is an ongoing programme curated by researchers and archivists Léa Morin and Annabelle Aventurin in collaboration with Open City Documentary Festival. The project aims to create a space to share films that have been neglected and overlooked – important works, many of which have been recently restored, that have been marginalised from dominant cinematic narratives. Two sessions at the festival revolve around the unreleased film projects of Moroccan filmmaker Kadrim Idriss and Mauritanian poet and playwright Abdoul War.
Screening at the festival will be new works from filmmakers Alain Kassanda, Ana Vaz, Annabelle Aventurin, Bani Khoshnoudi, Blanca García, Bo Wang, Graeme Arnfield, Harald Hutter, Ja’Tovia Gary, Jenny Brady, Joyce Joumaa, Julia Parks, Laida Lertxundi & Ren Ebel, Luciana Decker, Luke Fowler, Margaux Dauby, Mary Helena Clark, Maryam Tafakory, Miko Revereza, Miranda Pennell, Morgan Quaintance, Nour Ouayda, Peter Todd, Rebecca Jane Arthur, Riar Rizaldi, Rita Morais, Ruth Maclennan, Sally Lawton, Sanaz Sohrabi, Theo Montoya, Ulises de la Orden and Ute Aurand.
The 2023 festival will close with a joint screening of Margaret Tait’s last film Garden Pieces (1998) and artist and filmmaker Luke Fowler’s Being in a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait (2022). Where Garden Pieces is a vibrant live-action and hand-drawn garden portrait, Fowler’s latest film is an unconventional biographical portrait of the late Scottish filmmaker and poet.
