Open City Documentary Festival 2025

Open City Documentary Festival returns for its 15th year with the aim to create an open space in London to nurture and champion the art of non-fiction cinema. 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. The programme at Close-Up features works by Armand Yervant Tufenkian, Association for Solidarity with the Kansai Sanrizuka Struggle, Barbara Hammer, Christelle Oyiri, Diana Allan, Eiko Soga, Eva Giolo, Ewelina Rosinska, Film Flamme, Fukuda Katsuhiko, Jamie Crewe, Jerry Tartaglia, Johan van der Keuken, Kevin Jerome Everson, Malena Szlam, Mike Hoolboom, P Staff, Phil Zwickler & David Wojnarowicz, Sally Lawton, Sam Drake, Tom Kalin and Vika Kirchenbauer.

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Christelle Oyiri

Curated by Abiba Coulibaly, this programme presents a selection of the films of multidisciplinary artist and DJ Christelle Oyiri aka Crystallmess. Born to Ivorian and Guadeloupean parents in the suburbs of Paris, Oyiri’s self-scored video art explores the avant-gardism and visual vernacular of black diasporic and digital youth culture. An ascendant force in audiovisual culture, Oyiri’s practice has seen her named winner of the 2024 PONTOPREIS MMK and the inaugural recipient of the Tate Modern’s Infinities Commission. Addressing themes spanning racialised spectacle, colonial spectre in and beyond museums, sonic and club culture(s), mythmaking and cosmology, her body of moving image work is presented in its completion and outside of the gallery context for the first time in the UK.

Collective Amnesia: In Memory of Logobi and War! Club! Action! traces the genealogies of Côte d'Ivoire’s highly politicised, diasporic dance music while incorporating found footage and karaoke. Hyperfate is a personal meditation on the gendered necropolitics of the US Rap industrial complex and the director’s hometown. GROTESQUE: They make beautiful things about ugly people, is a nocturnal sojourn in the Louvre’s Egyptian antiquities collection, while I See You follows the gazes of the self-appointed guardians of the notorious Fauvettes estate ahead of its imminent demolition.

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Films That Fuck: Re-uses of Pornography in Moving Image Practices During the HIV/AIDS Crisis and the Present

Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS,Barbara Hammer, 1986, 8 min
They Are Lost to Vision Altogether, Tom Kalin, 1989, 13 min
Fear of Disclosure | Psycho-Social Implications of HIV Revelation, Phil Zwickler & David Wojnarowicz, 1989, 5 min
Frank’s Cock, Mike Hoolboom, 1993, 8 min
Please Relax Now, Vika Kirchenbauer, 2014, 12 min
False Wife, Jamie Crewe, 2022, 15 min
A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M, Jerry Tartaglia, 1988, 7 min, 16mm
Depollute, P Staff, 2019, 2 min, 16mm

During the initial years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, homophobia from outside the queer community and a fear of infection from within led to a growing erotophobia and stigma around queer sex or pleasure. To combat the existential threat posed both socio-politically and medically, queer artists understood the inadequacies of existing media and developed new strategies for activist moving image. This programme highlights one such strategy, namely pornography, either manipulated or presented as found footage, which was used to celebrate queer sex as a source of pleasure rather than shame. The pornographic also served as a tool with which artists were able to foreground the embodied, their work communicating with a viewer’s body as much as their intellect. Doing so provided an opportunity to document the pain AIDS was inflicting on individual bodies (often those of the artists or those close to them) in opposition to a dominant media narrative which dehumanised the seropositive.

Whilst the works from the AIDS crisis in this programme predominantly focus on cis gay male experiences, their use of the pornographic as an embodied media has influenced contemporary practitioners exploring a wider breadth of queer identity. Also presented in this programme are artistic uses of new forms of pornography that have emerged in the internet age such as popperbate or masturbation instruction videos, which remain a technology through which artists can engage a viewer with corporeality through queer, trans and feminist perspectives.

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Partition
Diana Allan, 2025, 60 min

Followed by Q&A with the filmmaker

“The Nakba isn’t over” was a phrase heard repeatedly by the filmmaker and academic Dr Diana Allan in the making of Partition. The project draws together found footage from British and Israeli colonial archives with audio recordings collected from 2002 to the present by the Nakba Archive. Newsreels, recruitment films, government propaganda, and films shot by the British army film unit during the British occupation of Palestine are re-photographed on 16mm, remade and reframed through a variety of hand processing techniques. These are set against a soundtrack composed of narrative fragments, songs, poetry, and field recordings from the refugee camps of Lebanon. Partition demonstrates how history persists, and the displacement of Palestinians has extended far beyond the original Nakba of 1948. The resulting film project is grounded in academic rigour as it challenges the power of the archive in establishing truth, power and memory.

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The Mask
Johan van der Keuken, 1989, 53 min, 16mm

The Mask is a film about the legacies of revolutionary ideals and a portrait of solitude and societal false selves, moving centrifugally around the life of Philippe, a homeless 23-year-old man in Paris, during the festivities thrown for the bicentenary of the French Revolution over the month of June 1989. Through exchanges with the young man, and observation of the structures around him, the film captures the ambiguities of the real image, that “leads us astray, away from the marks and markers of the documentary,” as van der Keuken wrote of the film in 1995.

Presented in collaboration with Sabzian in the context of their 10th anniversary

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Sanrizuka 3: The March of the Earth

Introduced by Aikawa Yoichi and Ricardo Matos Cabo

The Spring of the Great Offensive
Association for Solidarity with the Kansai Sanrizuka Struggle, 1978, 30 min

The Spring of the Great Offensive, shown here in its French version, is a militant Super 8mm film made by the Association for Solidarity with the Kansai Sanrizuka Struggle, which focuses on the occupation of the airport control tower and the history of the 13-year Sanrizuka struggle, highlighting solidarity between political and social movements.

Sanrizuka Notes #3: The March of the Earth
Fukuda Katsuhiko, 1981, 51 min

Fukuda's The March of the Earth, part of his four Sanrizuka Notes shot on Super 8mm, offers a different perspective on the conflict, from the young farmer’s point of view. A former member of Ogawa Productions, Fukuda remained in Sanrizuka after the collective left, where he continued to film and participate in the struggle. Last year Open City Documentary Festival screened another of the Sanrizuka Notes, A Grasscutter's Tale, a portrait of an 82-year-old woman who stayed in Sanrizuka to cultivate a small patch of land earmarked for the second phase of construction of Narita Airport. The March of the Earth portrays Sanrizuka's resistance through the peasants' everyday lives, focusing on agrarian issues in their ongoing struggle. It shows how the government tried to weaken the opposition by offering agricultural subsidies, which were rejected by the Youth Action Brigade, who instead took on the work themselves.

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Kashima Paradise
Benie Deswarte and Yann Le Masson, 1973, 107 min

Kashima Paradise was developed as part of a sociological analysis of rural and industrial Japan by Bénie Deswarte, who co-directed the film with Yann Le Masson. The project aimed to combine a theoretical field research and thesis on the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in capitalism and modernisation in 1970s Japan with a filmed document of people's lives, testimonies and fierce resistance. It examines the economic and environmental effects on an agricultural community of a new giant industrial complex in Kashima and highlights the struggle of farmers, students and workers in Sanrizuka against the construction of the Narita International Airport. Kashima Paradise was one of the films that brought the resistance movement of the Sanrizuka farmers to the attention of Western audiences and was widely distributed and discussed in the 1970s. In a letter to Le Masson in 1975, Chris Marker, who wrote the film's text and for whom the Sanrizuka struggle played an essential role, said about the film: "As we know, the symbol of cinema's magical privilege is often the 'time-lapse flower', this intrusion of another time into the familiar. This may be the first film in which history is filmed like a flower".

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Sanrizuka 6: Solidarity Struggles: Sanrizuka – Larzac

This programme focuses on the transnational bonds of solidarity forged between the Sanrizuka and Larzac movements, two of the longest and most significant land defence struggles of the 1970s. Both gave rise to original forms of protest and collective action. As in Japan, the peasants of the Larzac region of southern France refused to leave their land, which was threatened with expropriation for the planned expansion of a military base on their plateau. The Larzac, like Sanrizuka, became an enduring symbol of resistance, with a movement that lasted for years. Both struggles forged strong international links with other social, political and environmental movements. In the 1980s, a delegation from Sanrizuka's joint struggle groups visited the fields of Larzac, as well as other sites of territorial and anti-nuclear resistance across Europe. These exchanges fostered mutual solidarity and the sharing of tactics and experiences. The two films in this screening were made by young militant filmmakers working in amateur formats. Both document the history of their respective struggles while emphasising the solidarity between farmers and workers.

The Larzac: a Land That Wants to Live
Michel Cabirou, Michel Barbut and Didier Durant, 100 min
UK Premiere

Lo Larzac, un país qui vòl viure is a feature-length Super 8 film shot at 18 frames per second by workers and student activists from Millau, a village on the edge of the Larzac. For five years, week after week, they documented the collective resistance of an entire region against the expansion of the military camp. The film is divided into three complementary parts: firstly, the situation of the workers of Millau, a town with a disastrous economic record. Secondly, it focuses on the question of agriculture and the presence of the army in the area, as explained by the farmers themselves. Finally, the film documents the evolution of the peasants' struggle and its similarities with other international actions. The authors try to summarise the union forged between the workers and farmers of Larzac.

Copy preserved by La Cinémathèque de Toulouse and courtesy of Bernadette Boussuge.

The Spring of the Great Offensive
Association for Solidarity with the Kansai Sanrizuka Struggle, 1978, 34 min

The Spring of the Great Offensive is a militant ciné-tract made in Super 8 by the Association for Solidarity with the Kansai Sanrizuka Struggle. It focuses on the occupation of the airport control tower and documents the first 13 years of the Sanrizuka struggle, highlighting alliances between political and social movements. The version to be screened is the French version produced by ISKRA, reflecting the international interest that the Sanrizuka struggle had aroused among militant movements, including in France.

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When the Sun Is Eaten
Kevin Jerome Everson, 2025, 36 min

The latest in a series of works by Kevin Jerome Everson concerning solar and lunar eclipses, When the Sun is Eaten (Chi’bal K’iin) captures the total solar eclipse of 8th April, 2024 from three separate locations across North America. Shot in Super 8 and 16mm, in black and white and colour, Everson collaborated with cinematographers in Mazatlán, Mexico; Carbondale, Illinois; and Cleveland, Ohio to trace the phenomena of Earth, Moon, and Sun, lining up in space – the eclipse as celestial event.

Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya
Malena Szlam, 2024, 20 min

The latest in a cycle of films by Chilean artist and filmmaker Malena Szlam examining volcanic landscapes around the Pacific Rim, Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya focuses on the Bunya Mountains in the Beerwah region of eastern Australia. Made in the wake of the eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano in the Tongan archipelago, when an afterglow illuminated mountains across the range, Szlam explores the deep history and powerful geological forces that have shaped this ancient terrain. Filmed in 16mm, multiple in-camera exposures layer space and time like strata, drawing imagined cartographies where history and myth intertwine.

Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of Air
Sam Drake, 2025, 9 min

During the Cold War, the U.S. government developed a program of covert human radiation experiments, using its own citizens as test subjects. Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of Air is an elliptical exploration of this dark historical episode, operating across vast landscapes and individual human bodies. Fragments of archival and 16mm imagery – shot on expired film stock – evoke the locations of numerous test sites across the United States. Urban landscapes at night, bleached scenes of the American desert, and close-up details of rural America are interwoven with voice-over and on-screen text that reference testimony of the continuing impact of this period of covert testing.

Followed by Q&A with the filmmakers

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Making Films Together: Film Flamme + The Basement Project

Presented by Annabelle Aventurin and Ed Webb-Ingall, this programme brings together recent work by the Marseille-based filmmaking collective, the Film Flamme association, with videos produced in East London by the community arts initiative, The Basement Project, during the 1970s.

Tunde’s Film + After Tunde's Film
Tunde Ikoli and Maggie Pinhorn, 1974, 40 min

A compilation of recently digitised video experiments made by The Basement Project in the 1970s, selected by The London Community Video Archive

Les minots de Massabo
Ateliers cinématographiques Film Flamme, 2019-20, 8 min

Les etoiles de Massabo
Ateliers cinématographiques Film Flamme, 2021, 7 min

ROIKIN <3
Claudia Mollese, 2025, 43 min

Film Flamme is an association of filmmakers and artists formed in 1996 in Marseille. The collective has been working with local residents for over 20 years to produce 3-minute 16mm film reels accompanied by sound compositions. The introduction of digital camera workshops in 2017 has led to a further series of medium-length films, made collaboratively with the young inhabitants of the neighbourhood. This screening includes two short 16mm films produced through Film Flamme cinematographic workshops between 2019 and 2021, alongside the new medium-length work ROIKIN <3. Created following the tragic deaths of two young Marseillais, one of whom had been involved in Film Flamme workshops since the age of 11, ROIKIN <3 is both a tribute and an attempt to process, through listening and creation, the grief and trauma of the event.

Led by Maggie Pinhorn, The Basement Project collaborated with teenagers from Tower Hamlets and Hackney to create a series of videos reflecting their experiences growing up in the East End of the 1970s. The project emerged from the production of the now-seminal Tunde’s Film, which follows the eponymous Tunde Ikoli and his pals Colin, Micky, and Taploe as they struggle to find work on the streets of pre-developed Tower Hamlets. Penniless and constantly harassed by the police, the boys decide to cut their losses and rob a bank. Alongside Tunde’s Film, the London Community Video Archive will present a compilation of recently digitised video experiments made by The Basement Project.

Screening followed by a discussion

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Unstable Rocks
Ewelina Rosinska, 2024, 25 min

Filmed with a Bolex camera, Unstable Rocks offers a meditative exploration of the Portuguese landscape, where geology, animals, and human presence seamlessly merge. Shifting between black and white and colour, the film lingers on rocks, animals, religious imagery, and quiet, everyday moments. The rhythmic pace invites contemplation of time, the landscape, and the subtle traces left behind by both human presence and the natural world.

Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths
Eva Giolo, 2025, 24 min

In Eva Giolo’s latest work the resonances of place, magic and myth unfold through play. Attendant to the landscape through a child’s-eye, the film streams into the specific, hidden, and vast geologies of the Dolomite mountains, through the trills and murmurs of Ladin, the minority Rhaeto-Romance language spoken in the region. As the children narrate local folklore, this language and its oral traditions, passed from body to body, itself becomes corporeal and indivisible from the land.

Postpartum Film
Sally Lawton, 2024, 12 min

An evocation of the experience of early motherhood, Postpartum Film uses reenactments, performances and home-film to explore sensations of separation and wholeness associated with becoming a mother. 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, 2024, 17 min

Centred on an exchange of knowledge and experience between an indigenous Ainu elder and a filmmaker during the early stages of her pregnancy, Scent Line on a Moving Mountain pays close attention to the sensations of a type of ecological relationship that is no longer commonly practiced in Hokkaido, Japan. We see the two women foraging and cooking together, finding abundance where it isn’t immediately apparent.

Followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers

With the generous support of The Delegation of Flanders (Embassy of Belgium) to the UK and Ireland

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In the Manner of Smoke
Armand Yervant Tufenkian, 2025, 90 min

Followed by Q&A with Armand Yervant Tufenkian and Dan Hays

Drawing from his experience as a fire-lookout in the Sequoia forests of the Sierra Nevada in California, Armand Yervant Tufenkian constructs a careful study of the visual documentation of forest fires. Shot on 16mm but bringing together various media technology (from painting to photography to surveillance webcams) and modes of representation, In the Manner of Smoke moves back and forth between California, where Tufenkian’s camera scans the landscape, and London, where artist Dan Hays is observed as he meticulously reproduces, painting pixel by pixel, blown-up webcam footage from the look-out cabin, including images from a particularly devastating fire in 2015 when the landscape choked with smoke for several days. “Reverie and observation forge relations among a landscape painter in London and a veteran fire lookout in California […] the film forms an ecology of images from distinct and ultimately interlinked perspectives.”