Open City Documentary Festival 2022 by opencitydocs

01 Open City Documentary Festival 07. 13. September2022 TheArtof Non-Fictio Vennues across London

We reaffirm our aspiration to showcase the expanded field of non-fiction cinema, from artists’ moving image to documentary to expanded reality, and to do so independently of criteria such as running time and year of production. Whilst a majority of the film programme continues to be devoted to recent productions –albeit those which would not find distribution in the UK and for which screening opportunities remain limited – there is an increased number of historical works in this year’s festival. We are featuring a comprehensive, if not complete, retrospective of the work of Tsuchimoto Noriaki, a central figure in Japan’s postwar documentary movement; as well as In Focus programmes with filmmakers Betzy Bromberg and Alexandra Cuesta, special screenings of work by Maryam Tafakory, Onyeka Igwe and Robert Beavers, and collaborations with Another Gaze, the Non-Aligned Archives and UnionDocs that give light to the films of Helga Reidemeister, Med Hondo, Djouhra Abouda & Alain Bonnamy, William Greaves and James N. Kienitz Wilkins. Taking cue from the work of the Non-Aligned Archives, our Talks & Workshops programme will present the work of alternative initiatives, or “counter-archives”, that rethink the “archive” in expansive ways. We conceive of the festival as a discursive space, a gathering place for the non-fiction community in London and beyond – to reflect on the state of documentary today but even more importantly, to re-imagine together what it could and should be. We look forward to welcoming you all at the festival.

A now-irreversible move online that brings with it both opportunities – in terms of access – and losses – in terms of rapture. Does cinema still matter today? Does cinema still hold the power to bring us together? To transform us? To transform the world? We believe that it does – but it can’t exist in a vacuum.

About Us Partners & Sponsors

The end of the summer; a new edition of Open City Documentary Festival. A year ago, we prepared for our return to the cinema with anticipation, trepidation even. For many of our 2021 festival audience, the screenings they attended during Open City constituted their first time back in a cinema since before the pandemic. During the past twelve months, it has been hard at times to hold onto the ecstasy felt as we contemplated the ten static shots in James Benning’s Ten Skies, our 2021 closing film. Sitting completely still, transfixed, wishing the final shot would never end and to be there forever in the cinema. We might never take certain things for granted again – such as the right to gather together in a public space like the cinema – but the last year has brutally revealed the full scale of the aftermath of Covid-19 for the moving image sector: unsustainable working practices in the film festival world, a shattered film culture, fractured communities.

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’s Section for Public Anthropology, we deliver training programmes, an annual documentary festival, the bi-annual Non-Fiction journal, and events throughout the year that aim to challenge and expand the idea of documentary in all its forms.

Festival Welcome

The values that guide Open City – a commitment to film’s radical potential and transformational power, an endeavour to be sustainable, fair, caring and more inclusive – remain the same. A festival is a labour of love, but the confusion of love and labour is complicated and can lead to exploitation. A number of structural changes to the 2022 edition underline our desire for greater horizontality – for all films and film spectators to be treated equally, without the hierarchies imposed by competitive programmes, “industry accreditations” and any other distinctions between “delegates” and the general audience members. Our programme is for everyone and open to all. It is also important for us that our festival be more widely accessible for all, which is why we have worked with Matchbox Cine to offer a significant number of cinema screenings with descriptive subtitles.

Contents Opening & Closing Nights In Focus: Alexandra Cuesta In Focus: Betzy Bromberg Tsuchimoto Noriaki: A Retrospective Film Programme Talks & Workshops Exhibition—Bo Wang: The Revolution Will Not Be ExAir-conditioned panded Realit ies Tickets / Café & Happy Hours Venues & Accessibility Team & Thanks Directory Schedule116112109108106104102924232200604

The Shiranui Sea (Shiranui kai), (不知火海) Closing Night: 0504 Tuesday 13 September 2022, ICA, 6.30pm (see p. 37) DirectorTsuchimoto Noriaki, Year 1975, Country Japan Duration 153', Format 16mm, Audio Japanese spoken, English subtitles Opening Night: É Noite na América (It is Night in America) Director Ana Vaz, Year 2022, Country Italy, Brazil, France Duration 66ʹ, Format Digital, Audio Portuguese spoken, English subtitles Wednesday 07 September, Curzon Soho, 6.30pm, (see p. 44) Image still: É Noite na América Image still: The Shiranui Sea

06 07 In Focus: Alexandra Cuesta Image still: Territorio

Serge Daney observed that “every ‘form’ is a face looking at us,” and in Cuesta’s films, the reciprocity of the gaze is central. Alexandra Cuesta’s films have been widely screened at venues and festivals such as Centre Pompidou, Viennale International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Los Angeles Filmforum, Queens Museum of Art, and Punto de Vista, amongst others. In Focus: Alexandra Cuesta, is the first UK survey of her work and includes all her completed films as well as other films selected by Cuesta, with an emphasis on recent productions by Ecuadorian filmmakers and artists. With the support of Instituto de Fomento a la Creatividad y la Innovación (Gobierno de la República de Ecuador)

“I was struck by the physical manifestation of a city landscape that has been slowly modified and reconstructed to resemble another. The neighbourhood with its streets

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Alexandra Cuesta is a filmmaker and photographer who lives and works between Ecuador and the United States. Her 16mm films and videos are portraits of public places and urban landscapes, and the people in them. Reminiscent of documentary practices such as street photography, Cuesta’s work is also rooted in the poetic and lyrical sensibility of the avant-garde. Early films such as Recordando el Ayer (literally translated as “remembering the yesterday”), Piensa en mí (“think of me”) and Despedida (Farewell), shot in the United States where Cuesta received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, depict migrant neighbourhoods and diasporic communities (particularly Hispanic) – and they do so with a poignant sense of longing and belonging. Fleeting moments, memories to be beheld, as passing and elusive as the light that is the filmmaker’s (and the photographer’s) primary medium. As Madison Brookshire writes, “there is an operative longing that animates her oeuvre, an intertwining of intense beauty and a sense of loss that is as inextricable from her images as the light itself.” In 2016, following her return to Ecuador Cuesta completed the featurelength Territorio, a fragmented account of her native country from the ocean to the jungle. Recent works such as the autobiographical series Notes, Imprints (on Love) (2020-ongoing) and the Structural/ Materialist Lungta (commissioned by FICUNAM in 2022) foreground the act of filmmaking itself. Cuesta’s work is democratic but never neutral – it doesn’t simply “speak nearby” (as Trinh T. Minh-ha might say) but from within, the result of a complicity and shared intimacy that is only possible for a filmmaker who is herself a migrant.

Director Peter Hutton, Year 1990, Country USA Duration 15', Format 16mm, Audio Silent

Director Alexandra Cuesta, Year 2007, Country Ecuador, USA Duration 9', Format 16mm, Audio Sound

“Hutton’s sketchbook of mid-1970s New York, edited in three parts over twelve years, is a chronicle of indelible impressions and an act of urban archaeology. The artist evokes the city’s delicate rhythms, tonal contrasts, and shifts of scale – scrims of white mist and black smoke, of and textures and sounds, becomes a mirror not just of another place but also of another time, and of a past that is built upon collective memory. Beneath this reflection, the space remains an unfamiliar environment to its inhabitants and questions the meaning of ‘home’.” (Alexandra Cuesta) gauze, cloud, and fluttering pennant… the slight rustle of a homeless man’s shirt; the flowery patterns of rainwater draining from a flooded street; and a winter fog rolling over the sandy rivulets of Coney Island, making of it a lunar park, removed from time.” (Josh Siegel)

01. Recordando el Ayer 02. New York Portrait, Chapter III Thursday 08 September, ICA, 6.15pm In Focus: Alexandra Cuesta 1

A portrait of Jackson Heights, an area of Queens with a largely Hispanic population and New York’s biggest Ecuadorian community.

In the presence of Alexandra Cuesta and followed by a Q&A

05. Versos silenciosos a Quito y mi gente

Portrait of a small community living by the railroad tracks in the banana plantation region of Quiriguá, Guatemala. Originally a single take, this film is composed of alternating equal number of moving frames and frozen frames as the camera tracks alongside the train station. “Los Angeles Station is Leandro Katz’s simplest, most direct and probably least ambitious film and yet in many ways it is his loveliest. The result of the systematically structured material is unexpectedly stirring. Because of the impersonal method of construction, the freeze frames are not the result of sudden sentimental tugs. […]. The freeze may halt a pan or simply congeal an already held moment. In the first case, an image often ends up de-centred, highlighting the broadside of the shack-like dwellings with their inhabitants crowded at the edge. Or, alternatively, a smiling boy, full of animate life and sensuousness, suddenly becomes an anthropological document, frozen evidence of a time, a place, and a culture.” (Tony Pipolo)

03. Kristallnacht

“Kristallnacht is a deceptively simple film, focusing on reflections of light on water, seemingly at night. […] Visually, Kristallnacht is exquisite, a paean to the innocent pleasure of enjoying a night-time swim during warm weather. But because of the film’s title, and Strand’s framing the water imagery with two texts - at the beginning a haiku: ‘White chrysanthemum / before that perfect flower / scissors hesitate,’ and at the end, ‘For Anne Frank’- this innocence is recontextualized by its opposite. Kristallnacht, of course, refers to the ‘night of broken glass,’ November 9-10 1938, when the Nazis expanded their persecution of European Jewry by destroying synagogues, looting stores, and arresting thousands of Jews. Within this context the haiku suggests the sacrifice of Anne Frank, and the train we hear on the soundtrack comes to suggest the transportation of millions of Jews to their death during Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’.” (Robin Blaetz)

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Director Chick Strand, Year 1979, Country USA Duration 7', Format 16mm, Audio Sound

A contemplative meditation on public transport in a city known for its freeways and designed for those who own a car, Piensa en mí draws a filmic portrait of Los Angeles’ invisible population of bus-users. “Moving from east to west and back, the windows of a bus frame fleeting sections of urban landscape. Throughout the day, images of riders, textures of light and fragments of bodies in space come together to weave a portrait in motion […]. Isolation, routine and everyday splendour, create the backdrop of this journey, while the intermittent sounds of cars construct the soundscape.” (Alexandra Cuesta)

Director Michael Wood, Year 2019, Country Ecuador, USA Duration 5', Format Digital, Audio Silent A hyperkinetic film poem to the city of Quito and its people. Trapped in an in-between, the film searched for lost places and lost words; a abuelos, de mi mama, as I trace back para escapar el espectáculo jodido de los Estados Unidos to return to another spectacle of my own creation. Mirando la realidad, una mapa he creido. Solo quiero construir silent work created with “Spanglish” thoughts. Michael Woods writes: “Como puedo conocer los lugares lost to me como la lengua de mis

0 . BEIRUT 2.14.05

una mapa de todo, sobre dios, que puede escapar the nothingness that trails me like my shadow. Como un espejo. Like a hypercube. Como las escaleras espirales.”

Director Leandro Katz, Year 1970-1976, Country Argentina, USA Duration 10', Format 16mm (digital transfer), Audio Silent Director Alexander Cuesta, Year 2009, Country Ecuador, USA Duration 15', Format 16mm, Audio English & Spanish spoken

06. Los Angeles Station 07. Piensa en mí

Director Alexander Cuesta, Year 2008, Country Ecuador, USA Duration 8', Format 16mm, Audio English spoken Shot in Beirut, Lebanon during the filming of Ça Sera Beau (From Beyrouth with Love) by Wael Nourredine. “On February 14, 2005, a car bomb went off in downtown Beirut, minutes later the whole world was being shown graphic images of the incident that would later trigger a national uproar. Holding witness to this event, and made during the production of another film, the film carries a sense of urgency and chance, an accidental diary and sketch of history.” (Alexandra Cuesta)

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Duration 10', Format 16mm, Audio English spoken

An imaginary dialogue with a football player (Ecuadorian Antonio Valencia, a former defender with Manchester United) unfolds as written text over slightly underexposed footage of men playing football and bathing in a beach in San Jacinto, Ecuador.

alencia 03. Hand-Held Day Friday 09 September, ICA, 6.20pm In Focus: Alexandra Cuesta 2 03. 01. Image still: Despedida (Farewell) Image still: Hand-Held Day

Director Alexandra Cuesta, Year 2013, Country Ecuador, USA

Director Gary Beydler, Year 1975, Country USA, Duration 6', Format 16mm, Audio Silent

Director Daniela Delgado Viteri, Year 2021, Country Ecuador, Duration 6', Format Digital, Audio Sound (Spanish text, English subtitles)

“Shot in Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, this transitory neighbourhood resonates with the poetry of local resident Mapkaulu Roger Nduku. Verses about endings, looking, and passing through, open up the space projected. A string of tableaus gather a portrait of place and compose a goodbye letter to an ephemeral home.” (Alexandra Cuesta)

“Over the course of two Kodachrome camera rolls, we simultaneously witness eastward and westward views of the surrounding landscape as the skies, shadows, colours, and light change dramatically. Beydler’s hand, holding the mirror carefully in front of the camera, quivers and vibrates, suggesting the relatively miniscule scale of humanity in the face of a monumental landscape and its dramatic transformations. Yet the use of the mirror also projects an idealized human desire to frame and understand what we see around us, without destroying or changing any of its inherent fascination and beauty.” (Mark Toscano) (Farewell) V

01. Despedida

02. Antonio

Two opening instalments of a six-part series that meditates on love and the act of making, Notes, Imprints (on Love) is crafted from autobiographical footage shot in Upstate New York, Chile, Japan, Los Angeles, the Californian desert, Miami and Mexico City. “I wanted to approach filmmaking as a ritual of the everyday, using 16mm film to record objects, spaces, light; without hierarchy and without thinking of an end product. I had wanted to capture all the things. Everything and nothing at the same time: the sun falling on my kitchen plant, dilapidating factories in this American city, my husband’s back as he sleeps, the snow on the deck. What began as a spontaneous collection of images, in time became a documentation of my private realm, and this practice of daily filming continued for three years (2015-18), in various cities.” (Alexandra Cuesta)

From a point of view/listening that is both animal and elemental, between the air, the ocean and the sand, relationships emerge between humans, birds and marine life.

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04. Notes, Imprints (on Love): Parts I & II, Carmela 05. Cielo Abierto / Mar Abierto / Suelo Abierto 06. Lungta Image still: Notes, Imprints (On Love) Part 1 Image still: Lungta

Director Alexandra Cuesta, Year 2020, Country Ecuador, USA Duration 25', Format Digital, Audio Sound (English & Spanish text)

The lungta (Tibetan for “wind horse”) is a symbol for the human soul in shamanistic traditions in Central and East Asia. Alexandra Cuesta repurposes a few seconds of footage of a horse in a field that she had shot years before but never used in this analogue composition of image and sound that emphasizes its own materiality. A tribute to another Structural/Materialist film with a horse protagonist, the 1970 Berlin Horse by British filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice, it also evokes Muybridge’s early studies of horses in motion that foreshadowed the invention of film. “Illusion of movement. Apparition. Vanishing.” Made at the invitation of FICUNAM, in collaboration with sound artist Martín Baus. In the presence of Alexandra Cuesta and followed by a Q&A

Director Libertad Gills, Martín Baus, Year 2021, Country Ecuador, Duration 4', Format Digital, Audio Sound

Director Alexandra Cuestra, Year 2022, Country Ecuador, Mexico Duration 10', Format Digital, Audio Sound

Audio

Year

Director Mario Rodríguez Dávila, 2022, Country Ecuador Digital, Sound Director Alexandra Cuesta, Year 2016, Country Ecuador 66', Format Digital, Sound

Duration

01. Vientos de Chanduy 02. Territorio Monday 12 September, Bertha DocHouse, 8.30pm In Focus: Alexandra Cuesta 3 02. 01. Image still: Vientos de Chanduy Image still: Territorio

In the presence of Alexandra Cuesta and followed by a

Q&A

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Duration 17', Format

Audio

A brother and a sister perform rituals of illness and passing in a series of haunting tableaux shot in Chanduy, in coastal Ecuador, As Alexandra Territorio is a portrait of the people of Ecuador shot in their environs. “[..] the journey opens in the ocean, crosses the mountains, and descends into the jungle. A stationary camera portrays images of the landscape and of people waiting to be observed. The film is shot in three different regions in Ecuador, inspired by the travel journals of Henri Michaux, a Belgian avant-garde poet who travelled to Ecuador in 1926. In Cuesta has written, Rodríguez Dávila’s images “bring life to the ghosts of the past and his filmmaking becomes an exorcising gesture.” his journals, he arrives by boat and explores the various geographies in the country. He describes his encounters through detailed observation, yet by his own account, considers the book to be an incomplete piece. I was fascinated by his fragmentary approach to formal structure and by his raw elegy to the everyday that led me to my own description.” (Alexandra Cuesta)

This is a fragment of an essay by Madison Brookshire on Alexandra Cuesta’s work. The full essay can be found online on the festival’s website: opencitylondon.com/news Madison Brookshire lives in Los Angeles, where he makes films, paintings, and performances. His work invites viewers to become aware of perceptual processes and the sensuous experience of time. He is currently a Lecturer at University of California Riverside in the Departments of Art and the History of Art.

I want to be clear: I do not wish to suggest that this image operates either symbolically or through metaphor. It simply does these things, it does not mean them. None of the images in Cuesta’s work signify, that is, they are not rhetorical and do not form arguments. The images do not “speak” – even when the person in them is speaking. Instead, each shot radiates. There is a special kind of light in her films that certainly contributes to this radiance, but that is not exclusively what I refer to here. Rather, each shot radiates out, making connections with the others (as well as with us, the viewers). The fragment glows, producing a warmth that touches the others around it. There is no contest of light and dark, as in Expressionist cinema; it is a cinema of all light, all relation, emanating out from each shot, forming connections.

In Cuesta’s cinema, we never see a thing in its totality, only flashes, yet together these flashes evoke something tangible: a sense of a place or a person, or else a mood, an atmosphere. They are “Actualités” in the old sense–and in this way differ from most documentary films. Many of her works are “city films,” to be sure, but even here the logic is the opposite of a city symphony. Each film is a mosaic: fragments arranged into a composition. Even so, this composition is open, permeable, whereas one always senses in a city symphony its desire for completeness – a total representation or a representation of totality [...]. Cuesta’s work undoes this. Composed of fragments, it is intentionally incomplete. It lets the world in. This is true even in her long-duration shots, such as the opening to Territorio (2016). A different sort of film would open with an establishing shot–expository and orienting–whereas here, the first shot dislocates, disorients, is never fixed, but fluid. The title card isolates it from the rest of the film, makes it a fragment: separate, apart. It is a prelude, not an introduction. Yet it also radiates out and touches the others. With no singular, concrete connection, it suggests many, not just one. It is in and of motion [...].

Concrete Music: On The Films of Alexandra Cuesta by Madison Brookshire Cinema[…] shatters. But this is not – or not necessarily – violent. It is a shattering without breaking, a breaking up that is generative. It fragments our world. A fragment has power, so much potential: it has the ability to go in many directions–is not fixed but fluid. A fragment as fragment retains this ability, its potentiality. In most movies, it is as though this power is too much and must be brought to bear: editing involves assembly, putting things together so that they make “sense.” Fragments that have been assembled begin to resemble things: they choose a direction, become located, limit the possibilities. Instead of assembling shards, however, Cuesta makes them proliferate. Fragments form a composition, an image, over time. That is, the fragment remains a fragment, which allows it to form connections with others without collapsing or coalescing into a unary thing. It remains multiple and en route as opposed to singular and stationary. Simply put, it is open, not closed. This is perhaps most evident in Notes, Imprints (On Love): Part I (2020), a personal film made from swatches of image, sound, and text [...]. Here, even the landscape seems to fragment, with empty lots and abandoned buildings forming a loose series of anti-landmarks instantly recognizable as the deindustrial North. When a close-up appears–halfway through the film, a cut from brilliant fall foliage to a face: radiant, confident, in three-quarters profile–it is shocking. The portrait holds briefly before it flares and cuts to a wide shot of snow falling, accompanied by a sound like the clicks and pops of a well-worn record. This marks a turn in the movie toward the domestic and amid still lifes of house plants, hardwood, and snow-covered furniture are hints of the end of a relationship. The final intertitle suggests this when – in lowercase letters placed, almost provisionally, in the lower right-hand corner of the frame – it reads, (the end of love), interrupting and recasting all that has come before. Here as elsewhere, Cuesta turns the fragment to her advantage. This is what brings her disparate work together. Cuesta’s fragment is not or not only the abstraction a close-up creates, it is more like glimpses, little flashes or pieces of things, not a “strategy,” so to speak, neither technique nor style. Rather, the images as fragments

– and something happens within and between them: points evoking a field, evanescent flickers on the surface of a sea.

[…]

18 19 Essay.

2120 In Focus: Betzy Bromberg Image still: Marasmus

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American avant-garde filmmaker Betzy Bromberg has been making experimental 16mm films since 1976. Prior to becoming the Director of the Program in Film and Video at California Institute of the Arts in 2002, Bromberg spent many years as a camerawoman and supervisor for the production of optical effects in the Hollywood special effects industry, using skills honed in her astonishing kaleidoscopic experimental films. Her early work often explores women’s psychic interiors and threats to an autonomous body through performance and raw collage techniques, provocative imagery, and humour, tautly woven together by evocative soundtracks. These deeply personal films touch on repressive social structures, American landscapes, ritual and intimacy, “play[ing] on multiple levels, merging politics and poetry, and revelling in the resultant tensions” (Holly Willis). Her most recent featurelength films are formally abstract, light, and sonic explorations, which are nonetheless profoundly emotional meditations on the human condition.

Curated by Charlotte Procter (LUX), with Valentine Umansky & Carly Whitefield (Tate Co-presentedFilm). by Tate Modern and Open City Documentary Festival, in collaboration with LUX, who distribute Bromberg’s films. This programme was made possible thanks to a Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Grant from Art Fund.

Director Betzy Bromberg, Year 1977, Country USA Duration 18', Format 16mm, Audio English spoken “Shot in and around New York City, Bromberg’s first 16mm film, Petit Mal, is an invigorating, pissed-off assessment of women’s physical and social confinement. Ostensibly a portrait of an artist friend, the film is driven by a conversational firstperson voiceover describing feelings of being trapped by the expectations of others.” (Vera Brunner-Sung) Betzy B

romberg 1 Image still: Petit Mal

01. Petit Mal Saturday 10 September, Tate Modern, 4pm In Focus:

In Focus: Betzy Bromberg spans five decades of filmmaking and is the first in-depth survey of the artist’s work in the UK. Elsewhere, Bromberg’s films have been exhibited extensively in museums, cultural venues and festivals including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the San Francisco Cinematheque, the Harvard Film Archive and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Bromberg has had retrospectives at Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (BAFICI) in 2012 and at Anthology Film Archives, New York in 2018.

“Bromberg merges strange and abject images of confinement and escape with a coldly technological environment, and she pits the desire for continuity and coherence against the pure pleasure of drifting through images…Bromberg’s work has plenty to teach us about formal experimentation and the magic of juxtaposition.” (Holly Willis)

03. Followed by a conversation between Betzy Bromberg and Charlotte Procter Image still: Soothing the Bruise Image still: A Darkness Swallowed

01. A Darkness Swallowed Saturday 10 September, Tate Modern, 6pm In Focus: Betzy Bromberg 2

Director Betzy Bromberg, Laura Ewing, Year 1981, Country USA Duration 24', Format 16mm, Audio English & spoken

French

“A subjective assault, Soothing the Bruise is a kind of found cinema, in which the pieces of existence, the pablum pop of Top 40 radio, mix effortlessly with thermonuclear techno-jargon, and stoned-out kids camping around in the buff coexist in a restless uneasy mix with Times Square strip shows, neon effluvia, lugubrious country-western ballads and Bromberg’s own visceral polemics.” (Brian Lambert)

A Darkness Swallowed opens on a pair of faded photographs showing an old, dented car, one with a child standing beside it and the other without. Speaking in voice-over, Bromberg references a past event, once that will forever haunt her although it occurred before her birth. The film then sinks downward, dipping below the surface of the rational world to mine the seemingly infinite layers of the past stored within the fleshy entrails, chalky bones, sinewy spider webs and gnarled ligaments of both the body and the Earth. Noises – of clanging metal, bells, heartbeats and jazz music, to name only a few – combine to create a dense sound environment, a seemingly immense, three-dimensional space for contemplation. As with all of Bromberg’s films, there are images that, once seen, will stay with you forever, and then there are the colours – rich, luscious hues to be savoured slowly. Dedicated to the filmmaker’s mother, the film is also a gift to us, a reminder of cinema’s organic basis in chemistry and light, and of its ability to take us deep inside.” (Holly Willis)

02. Marasmus 25

In the presence of Betzy Bromberg

“

03. Soothing the Bruise

Director Betzy Bromberg, Year 1980, Country USA Duration 21', Format 16mm, Audio English spoken

Director Betzy Bromberg, Year 2005, Country USA Duration 78', Format 16mm, Audio English spoken

Director Betzy Bromberg, Year 1988, Country USA Duration 40', Format 16mm, Audio English spoken

“In Ciao Bella (1978), Bromberg shows us a world of crowded New York streets and hauntingly empty interior spaces, graced briefly by wisps of childish energy and the provocation of nearly naked women. She deftly contrasts such vibrant exuberance with a sense of devastating loss, and the effect is at once brazenly personal (if elliptical) and incredibly powerful. Unfolding desire merges with the ever-present reality of the threat of losing what you love….

“The body, culture and nature are also at stake in Body Politic, a film that goes to a hospital operating room, research laboratories and a family picnic to outline the issues raised by genetic experimentation. With her typical serious humour, Bromberg explores both the claims A descent into a desert underworld. A macabre tale of life and lifelessness.

“In Az Iz, Bromberg builds what might be considered a jazz opera – it’s all saxophone riffs, repetition and fragments, but swells to epic proportions, essaying notions of origins and archetypes. The deepest one of the final shots is of a jubilant topless dancer caught in a reddish flare and sprocket holes; the picture merges the woman’s vivacious energy with film as a medium, and this is a perfect emblem for Bromberg’s work. She somehow lets her filmmaking and ideas become embodied in the film itself; they are folded together in a remarkable synergy that could almost be construed as some sort of philosophical system for being in the world.” (Holly Willis) of science (we can improve human life) and the claims of religion (God made perfect beings) and implicitly asks the question, ‘How do we know when we’ve gone too far?’ ... There’s no voice-over and the argument is made by an athletic juxtaposition and testimony.” (Helen Knode) blues highlight the sky behind three people in the mountains, and later, black-and-white images of twisted and torqued trees resonate with all the mystical glory of Being. Az Iz , with its sense of grandeur and beauty, is downright breath-taking, and the effect is sublime.” (Holly Willis)

01. Ciao Bella or Fuck Me Dead 03. Body Politic (God Melts Bad Meat) 02. Az Iz Sunday 11 September, Close-Up, 6pm In Focus: Betzy Bromberg 3 03. 01. Image still: Ciao Bella or Fuck Me Dead Image still: Body Politic (God Melts Bad Meat) In the presence of Betzy Bromberg and followed by a Q&A

Director Betzy Bromberg, Year 1978, Country USA Duration 9', Format 16mm, Audio English spoken

In Ciao Bella,

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Director Betzy Bromberg, Year 1983, Country USA Duration 37', Format 16mm, Audio English spoken

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01. Voluptuous Sleep Monday 12 September, Close-Up, 6pm In Focus: Betzy Bromberg 4 Image still: Voluptuous Sleep

In the presence of Betzy Bromberg and followed by a Q&A

“Betzy Bromberg’s Voluptuous Sleep is a mesmerising two-part 16mm meditation on the nuances of light, sound and feeling as evoked through the poetic artifices of cinema. Bromberg’s close-up lens becomes a tool of infinite discovery that reveals as much about our bodily sensations as it does the natural world. Combined with intricate and perfectly matched soundtracks, Voluptuous Sleep is a rapturous, re-centring antidote to the fragmentation of modern life and offers a new experience of cinematic time and memory. It is also an emotional tour de force.” (Steve Anker)

Director Betzy Bromberg, Year 2011, Country USA Duration 95', Format 16mm, Audio Sound

As Bromberg’s optical imagination became captivated by the transcendent possibilities of light and landscape, her cinematic language metamorphosed into an exquisite form of painterly abstraction. She replaced the hand-held camera, collaged editing, and found sound of her youthful films with slower and more meditative explorations of visual phenomena accompanied by trance-like sound compositions. The overall effect is what Kandinsky described as visual music, in which the colour of sound and the sound of colour resonate in mystical harmony. Bromberg’s most luminous images achieve that nearly indescribable splendour for which I am forever searching. Call it the divine ravishment of the senses. Ara Osterweil is a painter who works in the traditions of staining and gestural abstraction. She is also a writer and scholar of postwar art and cinema who teaches at McGill University in Canada. Essay.

Az Iz (1983), a jazz meditation on the desert, is the first of Bromberg’s films to chart this orphic course. Through experimental printing that transforms the arid landscape where three musicians play into a luminous sea of lapis, the film summons the divinity hinted at in its title. I’d bathe my soul in a slice of Bromberg’s blues.

30 31 for young women searching for knowledge. Yet despite the nascent feminism of her early work, Bromberg’s films are never didactic. Rather, in their voluptuous attention to the ways that light caresses surface – including the snake’s skin – they track the emergence of a profoundly rich, cinematic phenomenology. Heeding the eternal siren song to “go West,” Bromberg left New York for Los Angeles to study filmmaking at CalArts with experimental filmmaker Chick Strand. Her films immediately became imbued with the rugged landscapes of the West and the misfits who drift through their greasy spoons. But she also discovered the desert, where her more mystical visions first unfold. You can sense the transformation in her 1980 film Soothing the Bruise, which Bromberg commences by choreographing headlights so that they dance in the darkness like runaway stars. By the end of the film, however, one feels the upending force of the revelatory as it struggles to break through the raunch. Bewitched by the painted hills of the desert, Bromberg spins them wildly through a fish-eye lens. Like the strippers often glimpsed in her early films, the camera is putting on a tawdry show for a distracted audience. Somewhere along the journey to the resplendent visions that characterise her later masterpieces, Bromberg learned that to approach the sublime, you need to slow down and stop spinning. Of course, that does not mean that she ever sought to capture the world “as is.” Rather, she learned to harness her renowned technical wizardry to a more metaphysical search for illumination.

Bromberg, who often appears in her early films, has a documentarian’s attention to detail, and a rapt devotion to radiance. Somehow, she manages to keep the subterranean in tension with the sublime. The audio-tracks of her early films mix snippets of found sound – interviews, radio broadcasts, and pop songs thrumming with desire – with the stoned ramblings of the young women she records. Collaged together by this scavenger angel, they kaleidoscope the unconscious of an America longing for release as it transitioned from the shattered dreams of the 1960s to the doom of neoliberalism’s new world order. Despite their ear for apocalyptic discourse, Bromberg’s films are less orgasmic than they are malingering. Her first 16mm film, Petit Mal (1977), offers a portrait of a young artist friend intent on preserving her autonomy despite the often-entangled demands of sex and rent. The title, which conjures Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal while dodging the predictable climax of la petite mort, seems to suggest the pathologies of coming of age within patriarchy. Yet it also refers to a type of seizure that involves a brief loss of consciousness accompanied by quasi-purposeful movements and blank stares. Understood poetically, these momentary flashes in consciousness might allow one to look anew, with wonder if not full comprehension. This potentially epiphanic state of seizure is an apt metaphor for Bromberg’s early style of filmmaking, in which glimpses of an illuminated consciousness interrupt jagged handheld camera movements that revel in the grit of urban decay. Watching these punk paeans, I am transfixed by the unfolding mysteries captured and then blinkered away by her camera – from a close-up of stiletto heels strutting like an exquisite corpse, to a snake curling luxuriously in front of a window flooded with late afternoon sun. What is the meaning of such fleeting phenomena? One cannot help but note the serpent’s warning that the world is full of perils

Resplendent Visions by Ara Osterweil Betzy Bromberg began making films in the late 1970s in New York City, around the time that I was born. So I cannot say that I remember the New York one glimpses in her early punk films, or the young women whom we see navigating its thrills and pitfalls. Yet I do recognize them in their painter’s cut-offs and pink leopard print pants, pounding the pavements of the Lower East Side. For the most part, they are artists and guerrilla girls posing as ingenues, topless dancers, and waitresses – whatever it takes to avoid the domestic responsibilities of being someone’s “old lady.” Sexy, rebellious, and on the move, they’re in search of freedom and they’ll ride anything to escape confinement – whether it be the back of some Hell’s Angel’s Harley through the skyscrapers of Manhattan, or shotgun in a girlfriend’s car as it whips through more ancient canyons.

3332 Tsuchimoto Noriaki: RetrospectiveA Image still: Umitori – Robbing the Sea at Shimokita Peninsula

Presented in partnership with The Japan Foundation London and the support of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation.

With an introduction by Ishizaka Kenji, Japan Institute of the Moving Image

“The roots of Minamata disease are different from those of other human diseases... It is a form of chemical poisoning whose destructiveness is, at heart, a reaction against human beings caused by [the drive towards] “civilisation” ... Since the discovery of the disease, industry has interfered with the discovery of its cause, in a cover-up going all the way to the prefectural and national governments. That this obstruction has fundamentally not been overcome, even today, testifies to the fact that Minamata disease is, in addition to being a disease of the human body, a thoroughly social disease.” (Tsuchimoto Noriaki)

Tsuchimoto made films to show the effect of industrial pollution on people’s health, becoming a strong advocate for the patients’ rights and for the recognition of the disease. In this film, the first in a long series about Minamata, he visits a group of patients and their families who have sued Chisso, listening to their words, and understanding how the disease has affected their lives. It was shown and discussed extensively in Japan together with information campaigns, and it led to the identification of hundreds of new cases. This important film brought Minamata disease to the world’s attention and created a global environmental movement of solidarity.

In collaboration with Athénée Français Cultural Centre Tokyo, Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI), Courtisane Festival, ICA London, Kanatasha, Kiroku Eiga Hozon Center, Museum of the Moving Image in New York, National Film Archive of Japan, SIGLO, Toho Stella, and special thanks to Tsuchimoto Motoko. Tsuchimoto

Thursday 08 September, ICA, 8.30pm Director

Noriaki, Year 1971, Country Japan Duration 120’, Format 16mm, Audio Japanese spoken, English subtitles (Minamata—Kanjasan to sono seka) (水俣—患者さんとその世界) Minamata— The Victims and Their World

Tsuchimoto Noriaki Film is a work of living beings

In the small coastal town of Minamata in Kyushu, far from the metropolitan centre, the fertiliser company Chisso built a factory, taking advantage of cheap labour. From 1932 it dumped mercuryfilled wastewater into the sea for decades, contaminating the water and sea life severely affecting the health of local people and destroying their livelihoods. This became the worst case of environmental pollution in postwar Japan, whose consequences are still felt today.

3534

The work of Tsuchimoto Noriaki (1928-2008) occupies a central place in the history of documentary filmmaking in postwar Japan. Mainly known for his films about the struggles over the Minamata mercury poisoning incident and his staunch support for the victims affected by it, Tsuchimoto’s is a rich and original body of work which stands out for its commitment and ethical stand. His films from the 1960s were powerful and critical portraits of Japan’s rapid economic growth and the effects of modernisation. From the early 1970s onwards, he dedicated much of his career to making films about the fishing communities afflicted by the environmental disaster in the Minamata area. In the 1980s, Tsuchimoto also turned his attention to the threat of nuclear power and pollution and, following his interest in international issues, made films about society and politics in Afghanistan. Throughout the 1990s, he continued his work documenting the effects of industrial and agricultural pollutants in sea waters off the coast of the northern island of Hokkaido. Tsuchimoto developed a very personal and independent method of working based on a continued engagement with the social issues of his time, making films based on mutual trust and empathy with the communities he filmed. This retrospective includes several of Tsuchimoto’s early films from the 1960s, which chronicle an increasingly modern Japan and changing Asia, and the main trilogy of films made between 1971 and 1975 with the patients of Minamata disease, as well as several other films on the subject. It also includes some of his early PR films, and the important works he made about student activism and struggles or about the threat brought to small communities by the forces of “progress” and the uses of nuclear power. Organised by Open City Documentary Festival, this retrospective programme will take place throughout September in various venues across London (ICA, Birkbeck Cinema and Close-Up Cinema), with a series of central screenings coinciding with the festival dates. This programme is organised with Ricardo Matos Cabo, with thanks to Marcos Pablo Centeno, Max Carpenter, HARUKA Hama, HIRASAWA Go, Keiko Homewood, ISHIZAKA Kenji, Andrea Lissoni, Nico Marzano, MATSUMOTO Masamichi, ONO Seiko, SATO Tokue, Jelena Stojković, TAKASAKI Ikuko, TSUCHIMOTO Motoko, YAMAGAMI Sakiko, YAMAGAMI Tetsujiro.

Tuesday 13 September, ICA, 6.30pm

Saturday 10 September, ICA, 5.45pm

This powerful film documents the direct negotiations that took place between Chisso and the Minamata disease patients after the court ruling ordered the company to pay compensations. The patients selforganised to demand the company for direct compensation and lifelong medical care. The film makes the most of the use of direct sound, Minama

The Shiranui Sea is the culmination of several years of working with Minamata disease patients and Tsuchimoto’s masterpiece. After the first compensations had been paid, Tsuchimoto turned his camera to the sea and to the reality of people’s daily lives, continuing to draw attention to the disease that seriously affected them. The sea that carried the disease also provided the livelihood of these populations, who for generations had relied on traditional fishing for sustenance. The film establishes a comprehensive report about the Minamata situation throughout the years. There is a great sensibility in the way Tsuchimoto draws a portrait of these people, who tell about their experiences and expectations for the future as they live with the disease and carry on with their lives. The Shiranui Sea is a lyrical tribute to the people’s resilience and a film of healing that establishes the caring dimension of Tsuchimoto’s cinema: a time-honed and collaborative way of filmmaking, deeply sensitive and alert. With an introduction by Ricardo Matos Cabo

Image still: Minamata—The Victims and Their World Image still: The Shiranui Sea

Director Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Year 1975, Country Japan Duration 153’, Format 16mm, Audio Japanese spoken, English subtitles

The Shiranui Sea (Shiranui kai) (不知火海) 36

Director Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Year 1973, Country Japan Duration 108', Format 16mm, Audio Japanese spoken, English subtitles meticulously documenting the discussions and confrontations. The least known of the Minamata Trilogy, it is one of the most relentless films ever made about a community’s outrage in the face of injustice and corporate neglect. With an introduction by Ishizaka Kenji, Japan Institute of the Moving Image

3737

ta Revolt: A People’s Quest for Life (Minamata ikki—Issho o tou hitobito) (水俣一揆一生を問う人々)

An Engineer’s Assistant, ある機関助士 Tsuchimoto Noriaki | 1963 | Japan | 37’ | 35mm | Japanese spoken, English subtitles On the Road: A Document, ドキュメント路上 Tsuchimoto Noriaki | 1964 | Japan | 54’ | 35mm | Japanese spoken, English subtitles Minamata—The Victims and Their World 水俣—患者さんとその世界 Tsuchimoto Noriaki | 1971 | Japan | 120’ | 16mm | Japanese spoken, English subtitles Minamata Revolt: A People’s Quest for Life 水俣一揆一生を問う人々 Tsuchimoto Noriaki | 1973 | Japan | 108’ | 16mm | Japanese spoken, English subtitles The Shiranui Sea, 不知火海 Tsuchimoto Noriaki | 1975 | Japan | 153’ | 16mm | Japanese spoken, English subtitles The World of the Siberians, シベリヤ人の世界 Tsuchimoto Noriaki | 1968 | Japan | 99’| 35mm | Japanese spoken, English subtitles My Town, My Youth わが街わが青春－石川さゆり水俣熱唱 Tsuchimoto Noriaki | 1978 | Japan | 43’ | 16mm | Japanese spoken, English subtitles The Minamata Mural, 水俣の図・物語 Tsuchimoto Noriaki | 1981 | Japan | 111’ | 16mm | Japanese spoken, English subtitles Discover Japan: Tokyo Metropolis, 日本発見東京都 Tsuchimoto Noriaki | 1962 | Japan | 29’ | 16mm (digital transfer) | Japanese spoken, English subtitles Exchange Student Chua Swee-Lin 留学生チュア・スイ・リン Tsuchimoto Noriaki | 1965 | Japan | 51’ | 16mm (digital transfer) | Japanese spoken, English subtitles Pre-history of the Partisans, パルチザン前史, Tsuchimoto Noriaki | 1969 | Japan | 120’ | 16mm (digital transfer) | Japanese spoken, English subtitles Umitori – Robbing the Sea at Shimokita Peninsula 海盗り下北半島・浜関根 Tsuchimoto Noriaki | 1984 | Japan | 103’ | 16mm | Japanese spoken, English subtitles 3938 Friday 09 September 2022, Birkbeck Cinema, 10am-5pm Study Day A study day dedicated to the work of Tsuchimoto Noriaki will take place in collaboration with the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image. Tsuchimoto developed a unique practice of working with people and the environment, honed over time and with a strong ethical positioning that has implications to the way we think about the social responsibility and commitment of the filmmaker. We will discuss different aspects of Tsuchimoto’s vast work, with guests who will respond to his films and their wider implications. The day will include film screenings, readings, in a programme to be announced soon. For more details and updates, please see the website. FuPllrogramme Thursday 01 September ICA, Thursday6.45pm08 September ICA, Close-Up,SundayClose-Up,SaturdayClose-Up,SaturdayICA,SundayICA,SaturdayICA,TuesdayICA,Saturday8.30pm10September5.45pm13September6.30pm17September4.20pm18September4pm24September4.15pm24September6pm25September6pmImage: Tsuchimoto Noriaki

4140 his profession he would declare himself “a partisan revolutionary first, a filmmaker second”. In time, as Japan shifted gears from postwar reconstruction to rapid economic growth under the umbrella of the United States, Tsuchimoto, who’d cut his teeth at Iwanami Productions, released his early films An Engineer’s Assistant and On the Road: A Document, socially conscious works that railed against the prevailing social mood of the time. The same can be said of his Minamata series, which began with a work produced for television in 1965, back before terms like “environmental pollution” and “ecology” were household words. It was a subject Tsuchimoto would continue to tackle for the next forty years; indeed, his Minamata series is as much a historical record of the disease itself as one of his own maturation as a filmmaker. Asked why he had continued to make films on the topic over such a long period, he once responded, “Because Minamata has kept me thinking all this time.” Tsuchimoto was surrounded by like-minded comrades. These include, to name a few from the world of film alone, fellow student revolutionary Oshima Nagisa; Imamura Shohei, whom he studied alongside at Waseda University; Teshigahara Hiroshi, his comradein-arms during his time in the Mountain Village Operation Unit; his senior director Hani Susumu; Kuroki Kazuo, Ogawa Shinsuke and Higashi Yoichi, his fellow “Blue Group” members at Iwanami Productions; cinematographers Segawa Junichi, Otsu Koshiro and Suzuki Tatsuo; and young crew members who would go on to become established names themselves, like Koike Masato. Unique and fascinating connections can be drawn between Tsuchimoto and any of these figures so instrumental within Japanese cinema.

A later generation of artists have also been inspired by the filmmaker’s work. Hara Kazuo (1945–) picked up where Tsuchimoto left off by continuing to document the state of Minamata in the 21st century, causing waves as recently as 2020 with Minamata Mandala, a substantive work over six hours in length. In 2011, John Gianvito (1971–) released Vapor Trail (Clark), a similarly ambitious work decrying the soil contamination caused by chemical agents left behind at a U.S. military base in the Philippines, causing serious health problems among the local population. Both films end with a written message dedicating the work to Tsuchimoto’s memory.

There remains much more I want to say, but the rest will have to wait until I meet you all in London. I am very much looking forward to it. (Translated by Adam Sutherland) Ishizaka Kenji (Tokyo, 1960) is a Senior Programmer of the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF). He also holds the position of dean/professor at the Japan Institute of the Moving Image (JIMI) and has written several books, including Amidst the Sea of Documentary: Dialogues with Tsuchimoto Noriaki (2008), published by Gendai Shokan. Essay. Tsuchimoto Noriaki –Sketch of a Partisan by Ishizaka Kenji I am very excited to have been offered the opportunity to take part in this London retrospective of Tsuchimoto Noriaki. I teach at the Japan Institute of the Moving Image (JIMI), Japan’s only university dedicated to the production and study of cinema, and am also in charge of programming the Asian section of the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF). In my research, I have long specialised in the history of Japanese documentary, writing books and essays on directors such as Ogawa Shinsuke and Hara Kazuo. My relationship with Tsuchimoto was particularly special; during the last ten years of his life prior to his death aged 79 in 2008, Tsuchimoto welcomed me, thirty-two years his junior, into his home, where over the course of numerous meetings he spoke to me at length about his life in the world of film. These substantive exchanges resulted in a book, Amidst the Sea of Documentary: Dialogues with Tsuchimoto Noriaki (Gendai Shokan), which was published right around the time of his passing. Though it has sadly yet to appear in English, I hope to speak to you all at greater length about the book, Tsuchimoto’s last, in my capacity as its co-author when our paths cross in London. Tsuchimoto was a major figure of 20th century Japanese cinema. As per the title of one of his early books, Film is a Work of Living Beings, his works consistently sympathised with the plight of the vulnerable and suffering, most notably victims of Minamata disease. Not only have his films lost none of their relevance, but they also continue to serve as a warning for humanity’s future, making shining a light on them from various angles as important as it has ever been. Like other children of his generation, Tsuchimoto, who was born in 1928, grew up a militantly patriotic youth. When World War II ended with Japan’s defeat in 1945, the mood of militarism that had until then gripped the country dissipated overnight, and he came to distrust those adults who latched slavishly onto American-style democracy, in time becoming a devoted communist. After rising to a leadership position within a radical national student organisation, in the early 1950s he joined a so-called “Mountain Village Operation Unit” under the orders of the Japanese Communist Party – which was then advocating armed struggle – and was eventually arrested and imprisoned for his part in a failed plot to blow up a dam. His origins as a filmmaker are inextricably linked to the landscape of Japan’s postwar society; throughout his life, whenever asked about

Film Programme

Al-Yad Al-Khadra (Foragers) An vation

Image still: É Noite na América

Filmed in the zoo of Brasília, home to hundreds of species rescued in the city (giant anteaters, maned wolves, owls, wood foxes, capybaras, caracaras…), É noite na América is a reverse ethnography that foregrounds the non-human perspective of animals – those original inhabitants of a city that was dreamt for the future but built on a legacy of violence and displacement. As a headline in the local newspaper reads: “are animals invading our cities, or rather are we occupying their habitat?” Vaz returns to the subject of her native Brasília (which she explored in early films such as Sacris Pulso and A Idade da Pedra) and furthers her ongoing project of subverting the traditional power dynamics between filmmaker, camera and filmed subject – and between sound and image. The animals, a vital presence in many of Vaz’s films, are not only the subjects of our gaze; they too are watching us. Blue is the dominant colour; the underexposure a result of working with old and expired 16mm film, and also an allusion to the “day for night” technique which in French is called “nuit américaine” (“American night”), because of its prevalence in low-budget American movies, particularly westerns. É noite na América is a nocturnal western that blurs perspectives. “Midnight blue. The creatures return to the city. They nest in the parking lots. They glorify the inhabitants’ garbage in a nocturnal feast that escapes the tyranny of the sun, the monuments, the roads, the edifications. Animalistic spell cast against the empire of death in the dead of the American night: time that turns day into night.” (Ana Vaz)

Exca

Director Ana Vaz, Year 2022, Country Italy, Brazil, France, Duration 66’, Format Digital, Audio Portuguese spoken, English subtitles

This new film is part of a multidisciplinary project from artist Maeve Brennan that sets out a careful study into the international traffic of looted antiquities – the focus here is on a series of 4th century BCE Italian vases discovered in a trove of seized crates at Geneva Freeport in 2014. The vases were illegally excavated from their resting place by tomb robbers. The film centres around the unpacking and study of these artefacts by forensic archaeologists Dr Christos Tsirogiannis and Dr Vinnie Norskov. The history of these objects and their journey through the illegal trade of antiquities is unravelled through a discussion between the investigators as they position the artefacts within a wider discourse of the infiltration of organised crime networks in archaeology.

Director Maeve Brennan

Wednesday 07 September, Curzon Soho, 6.30pm

Title An Excavation

This new film from Palestinian artist Jumana Manna takes as its focus Palestinian resilience to Israeli legislation preventing the foraging of wild edible plants –akkoub and za’atar. Used in cooking over many centuries, the film follows these plants from earth to kitchen as a way to mark the alienation of Palestinians as they are denied historic rights of foraging. Documentary and archival material is interwoven with constructed fictional scenes depicting encounters between elderly Palestinian foragers and Israeli nature patrol guards. These are set alongside re-enactments of courtroom defences as those charged assert their rights to the native plants and attempt to challenge Israeli control mechanisms enacted under the guise of ecological conservation. The film acts to document the preservation of an ancient tradition as new legislation acts to further suppress and erase Palestinian history and culture.

Followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers With support of Mosaic Rooms

É Noite na América (It s Night i America)

Year 2022, Country UK Duration 20’, Format Digital Audio English spoken

Thursday 08 September, Bertha DocHouse, 6.15pm

Title Al-Yad Al-Khadra (Foragers) Director Jumana Manna, Year 2022 Country Palestine, Duration 65’ Format Digital, Audio Arabic & Hebrew spoken, English subtitles

45 +

47 Thursday 08 September, Close-Up, 8.15pm

This film focuses upon the extraordinary life story of Bouba Touré. An activist and photographer, Touré was one of the founding members of the radical Malian farming cooperative Somankidi Coura formed in Paris in 1977. Largely drawn from a rich personal archive, the film was co-directed with French artist Raphaël Grisey and charts the civil rights movement in France and the interwoven anti-colonial liberation struggles on the African continent.

Thursday 08 September, Curzon Soho, 6.15pm

Don Cucho sets out for new pastures, his herd in tow, as he does each year, and as his Andean predecessors have done for centuries before him. Under Diego Acosta’s observation, this well-established journey is injected with a new vitality. What would otherwise be mundane images of a seasonal ritual – the massed heads of livestock, the flow of water – take on a new otherworldly luminosity when captured on Acosta’s black-and-white 16mm film. From the expanse of the sky down to the furrows on fireside brows, every facet of the journey is captured with equal parts languid observation and nervy flickers of anxiety. Under the Sky Shelter is a pastoral journey that is deeply grounded in the materiality of its environment but that is not without a touch of rural eerie.

Director Diego Acosta, Year 2021, Country Chile Duration 70’, Format Digital, Audio Sound

Xar

Al amparo del cielo (Under the Sky Shelter)

Director Raphaël Grisey, Bouba Touré, Year 2022, Country France, Mali Duration 123', Format Digital, Audio French & Soninké spoken, English Subtitles predominant colonial gaze. The film is an assemblage of personal documentation of Bouba Touré’s activities: diaristic encounters; organised protests; at work on the farming cooperative site in Mali. This material, both still and moving, is enriched with other archival sources to trace a clear narrative of the anti colonial West African diasporic project operating out of Paris. Followed by a conversation between Raphaël Grisey and Abiba Coulibaly With the support of Institut français du Royaume-Uni

(Crossing Voices) Image still: Xaraasi Xanne Image still: Al amparo del cielo

Followed by a conversation between Diego Acosta and Ben Nicholson

Bouba Touré’s photographic practice centred on documenting the lives and struggles of migrant workers, using image-making as a way to present alternatives to the aasi Xanne

ublic AnthropologyF ilm Showcase Cycle

The bond between place and memory is brought to the fore as the effects of coastal erosion begin to threaten a Norfolk woman’s connection to her past.

Shorts:

Director Jaye Abhau, Year 2022, Country UK Duration 10', Format Digital, Audio English spoken Eden’s Echo

By reinterpreting the Fall of Man, the duality between civilization and wilderness is brought into question. Can we better frame our relationship with nature?

Director Caoimhe Durkan, Year 2021, Country UK Duration 19', Format Digital, Audio English spoken Coasting

Films exploring the fluid boundary between humankind and nature. Session 1. 67’

Director Mehr Singh, Year 2021, Country UK, Duration 21' Format Digital, Audio Hindi & English spoken, English subtitles Toofaan (The Storm)

Victims of Delhi’s brutal second wave of COVID-19 share their deeply personal accounts. Stories of survival, remembrance, and resilience emerge.

Image still: Coasting

4948

This year we are very proud to be presenting a programme of films produced by students in UCL's Department of Anthropology. This selection of work shows the ambition and broad scope of expression demonstrated by our students. Through a range of themes, these young directors reveal themselves to be strong and dynamic new voices in non-fiction. Friday 09 September, Bertha DocHouse, 2pm UCL P

Charles, a Sussex farmer, lives many seemingly contradictory lives. In this exploration of space, different aspects of Charles’ personality are revealed in three contrasting settings.

Director Samuel Newman, Year 2022, Country UK Duration 8', Format Digital, Audio Sound

The devastating environmental impact of single-use plastic is shown in this journey from oilfield to seabed.

Director Isaac Farley, Year 2022, Country UK Duration 9', Format Digital, Audio English spoken Quintessentially Charles

Praise the Duck Blood

5150 Friday 09 September, Bertha DocHouse, 2pm

Director Tabatha Batra Vaughan, Year 2022, Country UK Duration 8', Format Digital, Audio English spoken, English subtitles

The filmmaker reflects on his experience taking the rigorous and oppressively competitive college entrance exams in China.

A young Chinese girl’s desire to eat her favourite dish comes into conflict with her faith.

London’s Rocketship Launchers

Dr Wafaa Eltantawy creates a space for Arab women to learn to connect with and talk about their bodies.

A sensitive and perceptive inquiry into the oft contradictory (and sometimes absurd) world of the “anti-vax” movement.

All of the films in this programme were produced by students on Ethnographic and Documentary Film (Practical) MA and Creative Documentary by Practice MFA at UCL Anthropology.

Director Julia Mervis, Year 2022, Country UK Duration 8', Format Digital, Audio English spoken, English subtitles

For more information on the programmes please visit: www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/study

Films that explore subversive ideas that challenge tradition and authority.

Shorts: Session 2. 64’

Director Tom O’Neill, Year 2021, Country UK, Duration 20' Format Digital, Audio English spoken No Vaccine for Me Then

Director Shaw Xiao, Year 2022, Country UK, Duration 8' Format Digital, Audio Mandarin spoken, English subtitles

Radio On A celebration of the ubiquitous nature of radio and its enduring allure in an increasingly digital world.

The Talk

Image still: Praise the Duck Blood

The filmmaker sets out to uncover a mystery plaguing the London skyline.

Director Lamees Almakkawy, Year 2022, Country UK Duration 7', Format Digital, Audio Arabic spoken, English subtitles

Director Zenglin Yang, Year 2021, Country UK, Duration 11' Format Digital, Audio Mandarin spoken, English subtitles Endless

This personal observational study of the city of Baltimore allows the filmmaker Margaret Rorison to present an elegy to this post-industrial urban landscape. There is a richness of architectural styles documented here, with Rorison’s 16mm images focusing on specific typologies set against an experimental score by musician Bonnie Jones. Filmed in the golden light, the cityscape is mainly devoid of people. Instead, the focus is upon the textures of abandoned warehouses – elegant tiling, peeling paint, rich red brick. Wider shots reveal the grandness of Baltimore’s past in this quiet and valuable act of cataloguing the city. Rorison began filming material for the project in 2016, and since then many of the buildings have been dismantled. This film stands to act as both tribute and memory to the city of Baltimore.

Director James Edmonds, Year 2021, Country Germany, UK Duration 8’, Format 16mm, Audio English spoken 03. Configurations

“Three sisters move through public/ political space – a square, bridge, garden and hill – in this exploration of Black diaspora. (The title takes inspiration from Dionne Brand's “A Map to the Door of No Return”). Taking as its starting point empty carnival and parade routes in London, United Kingdom and Nassau, Bahamas, the film reflects on progress, the architectural

Director Margaret Rorison, Year 2021, Country USA

Director Rhea Storr, Year 2021, Country Bahamas, UK Duration 18', Format Digital, Audio English spoken histories of colonialism, and the female body in public space. Glass, mirror and stone are imaged in Super 8mm film, where texture and surface are used as a strategic way of moving through these four spaces. […] Gathering these disparate sources together is a worlding device which I have used to articulate the privileges as well as the difficulties of living in diaspora.” (Rhea Storr)

01. Through a Shimmering Prism, We Made a Way

5352 CombPinedro g ramme: Configurations Friday 09 September, Close-Up, 6pm

Duration 22’, Format Digital, Audio Sound 02. Baltimore

An abstract diary film, the camera in continuous movement – searching for motifs and patterns in the reflections of the light, the swirling waters, the shadows between the trees, in interior and exterior spaces, amongst humans

Image still: The Demands of Ordinary Devotion

An associative montage, guided by shape, colour and sound, of images that suggest motherhood and making: a breast pump expressing milk, a wicker artisan, a pregnant belly, a young woman winding a Bolex camera. As often in Eva Giolo’s work, the tactility of working with 16mm film is emphasized by recurrent close-up shots of hands and manual labour. Luscious fruit, cooling fountains, and flagrant flowers contribute to construct a sensual universe of touch, taste and feel. With the generous support of the General Representation of Flanders to the United Kingdom (Embassy of Belgium)

Director Eva Giolo, Year 2022, Country Belgium, Italy Format Digital, Audio Sound

5455 04. The Demands of Ordinary Devotion

0 . Come on Pilgrim Director Marcy Saude, Year 2022, Country UK, Duration 27’ Format Digital, Audio English spoken Americas, reframed here as the first step in an act of genocide. Plymouth is central to the film, as a key site implicated in the slave trade and other Imperialist projects, and the simmering background of the Brexit campaign allows these latent histories to emerge further. Brexit protestors, wizards, and Anglo-Saxon battle reenactors present a series of staged interventions to introduce counter narratives and problematise the historical placemaking of Plymouth. English settler genocide and the British colonial project are revealed in this film from American filmmaker Marcy Saude. Part essay film, part experimental landscape film, Saude works with local artists and activists to challenge official histories as presented on the city’s monuments and plaques. Saude found herself living in Plymouth in a flat overlooking the Mayflower Steps as preparations commenced for the 400-year commemoration of the founding fathers’ inaugural trip to the and animals. “The little personal myths and structures we set up to aid the survival of the psyche in times of low harvest. Finding subtle points of reference in subject and camera movement, in the landscape, its details and the traditions of the season, I attempt to connect the outside with the embodied camera and the inward gesture of the brush.” (James Edmonds) Followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers

It Has to Feel Real

of authority, and questioning the reliability of personal representation through a midpoint between the material conditions of the image and the emergence of meaning.

Emerging from the context of the recent global pandemic, this enigmatic essay film from Zheng Lu Xinyuan centres around the filmmaker’s initial lockdown in Austria and ensuing journey back to China. This is set against the family story of a missing patriarch - the filmmaker’s great grandfather who emigrated to Myanmar, leaving the family never to return. This fractured narrative is collaged together as mixed media

Friday 09 September, Bertha DocHouse, 8pm 56 Artistic Differences:

Jetlag Image still: Jetlag Image still: Special Features

ARTISTIC DIFFERENCES proposes a monthly series of film programmes, study groups, and public dialogues that can be joined from all over the world. Organized by UnionDocs with programmer Cíntia Gil, this collection of programmes brings together focused pairings of films and filmmakers with an intellectually adventurous writer or critic for an expansive conversation. Programmes are built collaboratively with inaugural partners Dokufest, Open City Documentary Festival, Doclisboa, Cineteca Madrid and Taiwan International Documentary Festival.

“Each party to an encounter has a profound impact upon the other and both will be changed as a result of the meeting.” (J.L. Moreno) This programme explores the psychology of the encounter, the performance of situational power, and how the production of narrative can be the ground where those tensions operate. If Greaves’ IN THE COMPANY OF MEN produces an arena where hierarchy and racism in the corporate workplace are challenged through a transformative encounter involving role play and the dramatic articulation of the unspoken, James N Kienitz Wilkins’ SPECIAL FEATURES and TESTER examine voice as the mechanism for the delivery of uncertain testimony – a dream, a found VHS tape – destabilizing the speech act, disrupting the production

Friday 09 September, Curzon Soho, 6.15pm Director Zheng Lu Xinyuan, Year 2022, Country Switzerland, Austria Duration 111', Format Digital, Audio Mandarin, Burmese, English spoken, English subtitles materials are unified into high contrast black and white video, allowing for a blending as the film shifts between time and place. Material gathered in Myanmar is interwoven with a series of intimate and playful scenes with the filmmaker’s friends and girlfriend. Family memories, childhoods, and past traumas are revealed, allowing for a personal exploration of memory, loss, and displacement.

5958

The first piece of the ANDRE TRILOGY, this film – or a lo-fi fragment from an unnamed video production – seems to explore the codes and roles involved in a filmed interview: a playful short-circuit between the act of reading and the act of telling, breaking continuity and crossing the boundaries of subject, story, enunciation. A man is multiple men, a lived experience is a dream, an interview is a performance, playing with our place as viewers with our own assumptions.

Followed by a conversation with James N Kienitz Wilkins, Cíntia Gil and Morgan Quaintance a Tafakor

transfer),

Produced for Newsweek and shot in an auto plant in Atlanta as a project to tackle racial friction between white managers and hardcore unemployed black workers, this was the first experiment with sociodrama in film. With the psychodramatrained actor Walter Klavun, the film is built from moments of improvisation among managers and workers, creating a complex piece that questions both documentary form and the contradictions inherent to the corporate production of visibility and representation.

Alongside the recent works Irani Bagi, Nazarbazi, and Absent Wound, Tafakory will share excerpts of her current work-in-progress projects. The screening will begin with a performance lecture in which Tafakory will speak to unspoken prohibitions in post-revolution Iranian cinema.

ompany of Men

Director James N Kienitz Wilkins, Year 2015 Country USA

Image still: Nazarbazi

English spoken In the

Director James N Kienitz Wilkins

Director William Greaves, Year 1969, Country USA 52' Format 16mm (Digital Audio C

Duration

, Year 2014, Country USA Duration 12', Format Digital, Audio English spoken Special Features

Duration 30', Format Digital, Audio English spoken TESTER

Friday 09 September, Bertha DocHouse, 8pm Friday 09 September, Genesis Cinema, 8.30pm Unspoken Words: An Evening with Mary

Built from the footage from an old BetaSP found on a VCR recorder bought on Ebay, TESTER is one of several experiments of the filmmaker with monologue and narration. In contrast with the precise and obsessive verbal construction, the film eludes control over what could constitute a centre or a subject to it, and rather plays with the asymmetry between what is perceived and how meaning is shaped, and the intersection between private and public.

Based between London and Shiraz, Maryam Tafakory is an artist filmmaker making textual and filmic collages. Her work interweaves poetry, archival, and found material to explore depictions of erasure, secrecy, and censorship. This screening centres around Tafakory’s ongoing body of research into representations of women, and the lack thereof, in post-revolution Iranian cinema. In these essayistic videos, images and scenes drawn from a vast archive of films are reworked to examine intimacy, desire, and prohibition.

6160 Director Maryam Tafakory, Year 2021, Country UK Duration 8’, Format Digital, Audio Farsi spoken, English subtitles 01. Irani Bag Using excerpts of films produced between 1990 and 2018, Irani Bag is a split-screen video essay questioning the innocence of bags in post-revolution Iranian cinema. Friday 09 September, Genesis Cinema, 8.30pm Director Maryam Tafakory, Year 2022, Country UK Duration 19', Format Digital, Audio Farsi spoken, English subtitles 02. Nazarbazi Nazarbazi [the play of glances] is a film about love and desire in Iranian cinema where depictions of intimacy and touch between women and men are prohibited. Director Maryam Tafakory, Year 2018, Country UK Duration 10', Format Digital, Audio Farsi spoken, English subtitles 03. Absent Wound Centred around two public spaces in Iran which women are prohibited from entering, this work depicts rituals of warrior training in combination with the recitations of a young girl coming to terms with her impending womanhood. Followed by a conversation with Maryam Tafakory Presented in partnership with London Short Film Festival

Mutzenbacher 63 CombPinedro g ramme: What Rules the Invisible Saturday 10 September, Close-Up, 3.30pm Image still: Mutzenbacher Image still: Offing

London 62 Friday

Director Ruth Beckermann, Year 2022, Country Austria Duration 100’, Format Digital, Audio German spoken, English subtitles Ruth Beckermann’s feature uses the 1906 novel Josefine Mutzenbacher or The Story of a Viennese Whore, published anonymously, as a starting point to grapple with male sexuality. As an introductory slide informs us, the book has been received as “a world-renowned work of pornographic literature” and yet contains an extensive “salacious and abusive portrayal of child sexuality.” In a Viennese studio, men of all ages arrive to audition for roles in a film about Mutzenbacher in front of Beckermann’s interrogatory eye. The sight of adult men inhabiting a young girl’s sexual life are equal parts disconcerting and darkly absurd. The casting couch, too often used as a tool of abusive men, is here a site of male discomfort. In an attempt to fill the silences left by the director, the men offer responses to what they have read, many personal, ranging from the lurid to the sensitively insightful. While the novel is over a century old, Beckermann puts it to use in to depict a tableau of masculinity that is contemporary in its contradictions and polyphony. With the support of Austrian Cultural Forum 9 September, ICA, 8.30pm

Director Tiffany Sia, Year 2022, Country USA Duration 10', Format Digital, Audio Sound (English text) 01. What Rules the Invisible

Director Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Year 2022, Country Belgium, French Guiana, France, Duration 17’, Format Digital, Audio French spoken, English subtitles 02. Moune-Ô Artist Tiffany Sia reworks a body of archival travelogue shot by amateurs in Hong Kong across the 20th century to create a portrait of a place as seen by outsiders. Patterns and tropes recur to reveal the idealised views seen by the tourist: the mountain, the dense urban skyline, junks sailing in the bay. This visual material is set against text intertitles in which the filmmaker’s mother describes an experience of life in Hong Kong that is absent from the images onscreen. The fragments of text reveal the mundane as well as moments of fear and squalor: colonial police, excrement, and hauntings in Kowloon in the post-war era. Sia combines image and text to explore the space between an idealised vision of Hong Kong and a lived reality.

6465

The footage originates from a contemporaneous documentary as Jean-Baptiste reflects on the context of the making of Maline’s film. Images are slowed down and the glitch in the pixelated VHS material becomes more visible, allowing for new questions to arise from the archival material.

The original moment is reconsidered through a post-colonial lens.

Saturday 10 September, Close-Up, 3.30pm

Largely made using archival material shot on a VHS camcorder in 1990s French Guiana, this film allows for the reworking and reclaiming of a specific moment – a celebration after the screening of the film Jean Galmot, aventurier (Alain Maline, 1990). Maxime JeanBaptiste’s father and many other locals appeared in the film, co-opted into a narrative that served French discourse around their colonial presence in South America.

Director Sherko Abbas, Year 2021, Country Iraq Duration 7', Format Digital, Audio Kurdish spoken, English subtitles 04. Silence Along The River

Director Oraib Toukan, Year 2021, Country Germany, Duration 28', Format Digital, Audio Arabic spoken, English subtitles 05. Offing

This silent 4-minute short film is filmed entirely on Super 8 stock and Director Wiame Haddad, Year 2021, Country France Duration 4', Format Digital, Audio Silent 03. Hors-Titre describes the details that build a life. All the shots take place within a quiet domestic setting that we are led to believe is an October evening in Paris, 1961. The clock and a crumpled newspaper reveal the context of this particular moment, a poster on the wall calls people to join a pacifist march for Algerian Independence. A man re-enacts his departure from the room, leaving the safe space of his attic to join the protest, a witness to history. The scene is revealed as a fabrication as the film shifts from colour to black and white, past and present, the imagined and the real. This is the reconstruction of a historical moment through carefully composed and observed details.

This film consists of a single sequence drawn from the personal archives of the filmmaker’s father Abbas Abdulraza, a Kurdish freedom fighter and cameraman. In 1985, he accompanied a group of fellow soldiers to document an attack mission on a military camp in northern Iraq. Abdulraza gathered a vast quantity of material relating to this conflict, and here his son Sherko Abbas uses the material as found.

“Sound is the biggest weapon”, says Palestinian artist and father Salman Nawati at the beginning of Oraib Toukan’s short film Offing. Recorded online in the aftermath of the 2021 war in Gaza, Nawati’s testimony describes his attempts to protect his daughters from seeing the war unfolding around them. He turns off the television and encourages them into a virtual world of video games, yet it’s impossible to remove the sonic violence that enters their apartment as Israeli missiles detonate outside. Against Nawati’s words, Toukan places diaristic images collected outside of Gaza over the same period; these range from the mundane to the sublime, and from the domestic to the overtly political. Voice and image act in dialogue with each other telling two experiences of the war interwoven through the film.

The footage captures the men as they navigate a small raft along the Sirwan River through a perilous region then controlled by the Iraqi army. Abdulraza records from the boat on a VHS camcorder as they row in silence, and when the soldiers arrive at the bank they break into song. The resulting film is a remarkable vignette of war and resistance, a quietly radical act in recontextualising found footage.

“I close my eyes. The crowd makes me smile, breaks my body, and that’s the end.”

Director Judith Noble, Year 1982, Country UK Duration 7', Format 16mm, Audio Silent 02. Mysteries

Director Hope Strickland, Year 2022, Country UK Duration 10', Format Digital, Audio English spoken, English subtitles

Followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers

Director Morgan Quaintance, Year 2022, Country UK Duration Various, Format Digital, Audio Sound re Spel

Director Patxi Burillo, Year 2022, Country Spain

Argileak (“Those who make light”) proposes cinema as a mystical experience. A nocturnal pilgrimage through the woods near Ezkio in Northern Spain revisits the history of the apparitions of the Virgin in the 1930s that drew thousands from all over Spain to this small Guipuzcoan village. Apparitions happened night after night in a perfectly choreographed liturgy that started with a procession through the fields and continued with the visions in front of altars filled with flowers and candles. Cinema is never explicitly alluded to, but film’s apparitional power is reflected in the illuminated faces of spectators in rapture in a sequence that pays tribute to Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973). Supported by a grant from Acción Cultural Española (AC/E)

Argileak Mysteries is a photomontage film, shot at Penmon, Anglesey and Whiteknights Farm, Hampshire. Beginning with a quotation from a dream, it becomes the filmmaker’s interpretation of the harvest and the old mystic theme of the Mysteries: “The women are celebrating the Mysteries on the beach at Penmon... No-one is watching... The sound of the general waves crashing against the bank of pebbles; the sound of the barley waving... Someone holds out her hand, holds it open against the sea. Perhaps it is my hand, the hand holds three ears of barley...”.

06. I’ll Be Back! 07. Miniatures 66 Saturday 10 September, Close-Up, 3.30pm CombPinedro g ramme: Fi

Filmed in archives and museums across the UK, I’ll Be Back! explores a series of collections containing objects of colonial violence. Amongst these is a book containing a diagram of a slave ship, a key document in The “Miniatures” are an ongoing series of compact films Morgan Quaintance is continually producing. These short shorts are all under four minutes long and allow Quaintance to explore a single formal or conceptual idea. The process of realisation can either be loose and improvisatory or time the abolitionist movement widely published for its shocking nature, and a collection of insects gathered in Sierra Leone by a colonial topographer mapping borders and defining British and French territory in West Africa. Shifting across digital, 16mm and archival formats, the film interrogates institutional collecting practices and reconsiders the artifacts of a colonial past. intensive and heavily edited. Each of the films uses either archival material, or footage Quaintance has shot using a DV of High 8 video camera. Using these mediums, instead of 16mm, allows for quicker production and a more intuitive approach.

ls Saturday 10 September, Genesis Cinema, 6.15pm

This film begins and ends with the story of the rebel slave Francois Mackandal. In 1758, Mackandal was condemned to be burned at the stake, not only for his crimes but also for his radical powers of metamorphosis.

Duration 15', Format Digital, Audio Basque spoken, English subtitles

Director Ben Rivers, Year 2022, Country UK Duration 7', Format Digital, Audio English spoken 06. IJEN/London Followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers

her native village of Lakabe, on the slopes of the Navarrese Pyrenees (which includes films previously shown at Open City such a Gorria and Urpean Lurra), Paraíso brings together Barber’s careful observational cinema with Lameiro’s embodied, corporeal filmmaking. Both Barber and Lameiro have engaged with collective and participative processes before, but more than an exchange between their Lameiro. Adding a new chapter to Barber’s long-term project of documenting the environment around two artistic practices, Paraíso proposes one with and between the inhabitants of the woods around Lakabe, both human and non-human; a film told by the trees who are about to be cut to make way for pasture fields. Supported by a grant from Acción Cultural Española (AC/E)

6968 Saturday 10 September, Genesis Cinema, 6.15pm Spring tides at Ynys Llanddwyn at the full and new moon are compared to the filmmaker’s own “body tides” from dark to light and back again. Like other films by Judith Noble (formerly Higginbottom), Red Sea is concerned with the menstrual cycle, and its relationship to lunar cycle. Higginbottom and other feminist artists such as Catherine Elwes, Carolee Schneemann, and Judy Clark were trying to reclaim menstruation from its negative image and assert it as a source of creative energy. Red Sea is made of 16mm film and 35mm still images, re-worked and over-printed. Higginbottom was also a member of Circles – the first women artists’ film and video distribution organisation in Britain. Circles was founded in 1979 by a group of filmmakers including Lis Rhodes, Jo Davis, Felicity Sparrow and Annabel Nicolson, many of whom had worked at London Film-Makers Co-operative. Their work continues today through Cinenova, formed in 1991 from the merger of Circles and another feminist distributor, Cinema of Women.

03. Fire Spells

A post-apocalyptic landscape of rocks and toxic fumes devoid of human presence but not of life. On the soundtrack, we hear Herbert Read’s recitation of his poem The Autumn of the World which contemplates a devastated world of chaos and decay, “blood-flecked clouds”, and “vermilioned vastness”. A contemporary of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Read served in the western front during the First World War –an experience that would shape and haunt his writing. Ben Rivers’ 16mm films often blend speculative fiction and documentary, imagining alternative narratives, ways of worldmaking and our relationship to the wilderness.

Image still: Fire Spells

Director Maddi Barber, Marina Lameiro, Year 2021, Country Spain Duration 22', Format Digital, Audio Basque & Spanish spoken, English subtitles 5. Paraíso Fire Spells follows the artist, filmmaker, academic, and writer, Judith Noble, as she makes protection fire spells for the filmmaker. The film is both a portrait of Judith and her views on magical practice, and a ritual film itself.

. R

Director Tom Chick, Year 2022, Country UK Duration 9', Format Digital, Audio English spoken

Paraíso is the first collaboration between two young Navarre filmmakers, Maddi Barber and Marina

Director Judith Noble , Year 1982, Country UK Duration 6', Format 16mm, Audio Silent 04 ed Sea

During the heady months of insurrection that marked 1968 across the globe, Helga Reidemeister (then a social worker) became part of a student-led struggle on behalf of the neglected residents of the Märkisches Viertel, the biggest housing estate in West Berlin at the time. Apprehensive about the way her fellow leftists were treating its inhabitants as theory and disappointed by militant (male) filmmakers’ exclusive focus on sites of production like the factory, Reidemeister began work on Der gekaufte Traum (completed 1977), giving one resident family a Super-8 camera with which they could film their own site of domestic reproduction. Her second film, Is this Fate?, (Von Wegen “Schicksal”, 1979), is an even more intense and unflinching document of the neighbouring Bruder family and one in which the filmmaker’s interventionism and will constitute an important metatextual layer. The film opens with the family’s determined but exhausted matriarch Irene watching rushes on an editing table, in which one of her four children denounces Reidemeister’s desire to film their familial conflicts. “[The children] just don’t see that our family’s problems are not unique to us,” Irene says, countering Tolstoy’s thesis that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.

Violence is the focus of Is This Fate? and it is what the verbose and charismatic cast of six variously analyse, refute and justify. The film is a unique document of the second and third generation’s reckoning with their nation’s legacy –though despite the mother’s keenness to blame society, this geographically specific spectre is never named. But it is also a brilliant and universal case study for ideas about nature vs nurture, the “good-enough” mother, the welfare state, and how to live together. Co-presented with Another Gaze in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut London With an introduction by Daniella Shreir

+ 8th edition FRAMES of REPRESENTATION The ICA’s annual festival celebrating the cinema of the real 20 – 29 April 2023 Collective Mobilisation Radical contemporary Portuguese cinema PREVIEW: Dry Ground Burning + Q&A Tuesday 30 August, 6pm UK & Ireland Theatrical Release: 2 September www.ica.art@icalondon 71 Saturday 10 September, Curzon Soho, 8.30pm Von W“Scegen hicksal”

(Is This Fate?)

Director Helga Reidemeister, Year 1979, Country Germany Duration 120ʹ, Format 16mm (digital transfer), Audio German spoken, English subtitles

Year 2022, Country Germany, UK Duration 40’, Format Digital Audio English spoken

A programme of films completed by influential avant-garde filmmaker Robert Beavers since his 2007 Tate Modern retrospective “To the Winged Distance: Films by Robert Beavers,” the majority of which are being presented in London for the first time. Although born and raised in Massachusetts, Beavers re-located to Europe in 1967 with filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos, and over the next decades made films in Greece, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany and Italy. Following Markopoulos’ death in 1992, he set up the Temenos archive in Uster, Switzerland to preserve his work and legacy. He lives with the filmmaker Ute Aurand in Berlin and Massachusetts and continues to make films on 16mm. His most recent work The Sparrow Dream, which will premiere at Open City, forms (with Pitcher of Colored Light and Listening to the Space in my Room) a loose trilogy of studies of the filmmaker’s domestic spaces. Interconnected, the films in this programme dialogue with one another. Often, the editing of one film is interlaced with the shooting of the next one, proposing an endless cycle of watching, filming, viewing, living. For Beavers, filming begins in the eyes of the filmmaker and is shaped by his gestures in relation to the camera. This attention to the physicality of the medium is evident also in the editing – a fully manual process that leads to a unique form of phrasing. As he has written: “A continuity develops for the filmmaker between the physical structure of the medium and each action involved in the filming, whether simple or complex and this bodily sense is extended in other ways during the editing.”

Director Robert Beavers, Year 2007, Country USA Duration 24', Format 16mm, Audio Sound 01. Pitcher of Colored Light

72 73

This essay film by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner interrogates moments of change within the history of measurement standardisation. Complex social and political contexts are traced: land surveying, the invention of the metric system at the time of the French Revolution, and more recent digital innovations. Radical and democratic forms of knowledge are possible in this new landscape, but this is problematised by the accompanying possibilities of control and demarcation. LiDAR scans portray the omnipotent possibilities of digital measuring systems. These point cloud visuals are set against staged speculations and live action performances of Enlightenment scientists at work in French fields, and early mapped projections of the earth from above. Corporeal embodied forms of measuring shift from tangible space to a newly quantified and abstracted landscape.

Title The Making of Crime Scenes Director Che-Yu Hsu, Year 2022 Country Taiwan, Duration 21’ Format Digital, Audio Mandarin spoken, English subtitles

Title Constant, Director Sasha Litvintseva, Beny Wagner

Saturday 10 September, Genesis Cinema, 8.30pm Constant +The Making of Crime Scenes

Contemporary forensic scanning software begins this film as a way to reconstruct the murder scene of Taiwanese American writer Henry Lu in 1985. Set against this footage is testimony from Wu Dun, a Wuxia film producer and member of the United Bamboo Gang, the largest of Taiwan’s three main Triad societies. Wu Dun was implicated in the assassination of Henry Lu ordered by the Kuomintang Military Intelligence bureau. The core visuals of the film relocate us to an abandoned film set where CheYu Hsu restages scenes of the murder for an imagined Wuxia production. Overlaid is the voice of Wu Dun revealing the involvement of criminal gangs in the Kung Fu film industry and his own personal involvement in the death of Henry Lu. Ambitious tensions are generated as the film sets out to explore the implicit relationship between filmmaking and politics.

Robert Beavers: Recent Films

Followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers “I have filmed my mother’s house and her garden […]. The shadows play an essential part in the mixture of loneliness and peace that exists here. The seasons move from the garden into the house, projecting rich diagonals in the early morning or late afternoon. Each shadow is a subtle balance of stillness and movement; it shows the vital instability of space. Its special quality opens a passage to the subjective; a voice within the film speaks to memory. The walls are screens through which I pass to the inhabited privacy. We experience a place through the perspective of where we come from and hear another’s voice through our own acoustic. The sense of place is never separate from the moment.” (Robert Beavers)

Saturday 10 September, ICA, 8.40pm

7574 02. 03. 05. Saturday 10 September, ICA, 8.40pm 04. 01. Image still: The Suppliant Image still: Pitcher of Colored Light Image still: “Der Klang, die Welt…” Image still: The Sparrow Dream Image still: Listening to the Space in My Room

he Suppliant

Director Robert Beavers, Year 2010, Country USA Duration 5', Format 16mm, Audio Sound 02. T

(Robert Beavers, July 2022)

(Robert Beavers)

Director Robert Beavers, Year 2022, Country USA, Germany Duration 29', Format 16mm, Audio Sound

“My starting point was a question about how the places where I have lived influenced how I see. With this thought in mind, I returned to one or two locations in Berlin that I had filmed for Diminished Frame in 1970. One was the milestone opposite Schloss Charlottenburg. In 1970, the milestone stood as a sombre sphere topped by a Prussian spike that I filmed in black and white; now I saw it as a golden globe surrounded by regenerate leaves with a view to Fortuna. I also found the same statue that I had filmed in Brooklyn in 2002 for The Suppliant standing in Leopoldplatz, Wedding. “Between 2016 and 2019, I filmed in Berlin and

Director Robert Beavers, Year 2013, Country Switzerland, Germany, USA, Duration 19', Format 16mm, Audio Sound

0 . Listening to the Space in My Room “Filmed in the same site as Listening to the Space in My Room, “Der Klang, alone in the house. In my film, Dieter Staehelin, now deceased, is speaking about the place of music in his life, and we see him and Cécile performing an Arabesque by Bohuslav Martinů die Welt…” was intended as a gift to Cécile Staehelin, who now lives on the cello and piano. She had once stated a wish for her life to end like the last notes of this music.” (Robert Beavers)

Director Robert Beavers, Year 2018, Country USA, Germany, Duration 5', Format 16mm, Audio Sound 04. “Der Klang, die Welt…”

7776 Saturday 10 September, ICA, 8.40pm “My filming for The Suppliant was done in February 2003, while a guest in the Brooklyn Heights apartment of Jacques Dehornois. When I recollect the impulse for this filming, I remember my desire to show a spiritual quality united to the sensual in my view of this small Greek statue. I chose to reveal the figure solely through its blue early morning highlights and in the orange sunlight of late afternoon. After filming the statue, I walked down to the East River and continued to film near the Manhattan Bridge and the electrical works; then I returned to the apartment and filmed a few other details. I set this film material aside, while continuing to film and edit Pitcher of Colored Light, later I took it up twice to edit but could not find my way. Most of the editing was finally done in 2009; then I waited to see whether it was finished and found that it was not. In May 2010, I made several editing changes and created the soundtrack with thoughts of this friend’s recent death.”

sidesWeymouth,WarOdysseyturningconnectedgesturesconcentratingMassachusetts,onparticulardomesticandsomelocationstomychildhood.ThepagesofaversionoftheandthesightofaKoreanmonumentinmyhometown,suggesteddifferentofthesamesubject: Nostos* or homecoming. The vision of Greece that was first awakened in my childhood remains a source. Despite different histories, one culture reflects another, and I asked the question: “Why have I returned to film these places, which I left so many years ago?” “For the deep view it gives now.”

“In Berlin, each morning, I remove the ashes from the ceramic oven in my room before lighting the new coals; each time a different thought arises while I look at the flames. There is an infinite number of qualities in fire.”

*“nostos: return, homecoming; song about homecoming; return to light and life The word nostos is derived from the Indo-European root *nes- ‘return to light and life’; from Indo-European languages other than Greek, we see that this root occurs in myths having to do with Morning Star / Evening Star. The morning star ‘that heralds the approach of dawn’ which shines as Odysseus comes back to Ithaca indicates that Odysseus is returning from the dead as well as from his journey.”

05.

Robert Beavers films his room in Zurich, and its immediate surroundings, during the editing of his previous film The Suppliant. The seasons go by and he observes, with great warmth his neighbours and hosts, an elderly couple. While he, a musician, plays the cello, she tends to the garden. All three characters share a space (though never at the same time) and a dedication to their respective activities: music, gardening, filmmaking. A celebration of light and colour and an intimate ode to existence.

The Sparrow Dream With the support of the Goethe-Institut London Followed by a conversation between Robert Beavers and Mark Webber

79 Sunday 11 September, ICA, 2.45pm Director Dora García, Year 2021, Country Belgium, France, Mexico, Norway, Duration 65’, Format Digital, Audio Spanish & Purépecha spoken, English subtitles Si Pudiera Desear Algo (If I Could Wish for Something)

78 Image still: Si Pudiera Desear Algo

Presented in collaboration with Birds Eye View / Reclaim the Frame Image still: Si Pudiera Desear Algo

Taking its title from a 1930 song by Friedrich Höllander, If I Could Wish for Something is an inquiry into how to bring about more safety, security, and ultimately happiness for women, without leaving behind the empathy and solidarity that has grown as a form of resistance against sustained misogyny and continuing femicides. The film traces recent mass-participation feminist actions in Mexico City which have sought to dismantle the patriarchal violence of the state and imagine a radical future in its place. Interspersed with this footage of protests, squats and graffiti are glimpses into the studio of La Bruja de Texcoco, a trans musician based in the city. Over the course of the film, she writes, develops and records music, culminating with a finished song that is an articulation of the sentiment for a liberated future, and the film’s theme song.

In Sylvia Kristel – Paris, Kristel’s voice and image are always kept separate. Shots of modern-day Paris – quasistatic in their duration and timeless in their analogue film stock quality and colour tones – free space for the spectator to concentrate on the soundtrack: an account of Sylvia Kristel’s years in Paris, recorded twice with subtle but meaningful differences between both versions.

Sunday 11 September, Close-Up, 3.30pm ravaged by exploitation. Machines stand within huge excavated spaces against a backdrop of slag heaps, and abandoned buildings have been taken over by wilderness. Scenes from the town today are interwoven with a range of diverse archival materials; newspapers, company reports on microfiche, audio, film footage, and letters voiced by actors are combined to reveal a bitter struggle between workforce and company management – a conflict between the capitalist and socialist ideologies of the 1930s. Followed by a Q&A with Jessica Johnson and Ryan Ermacora

81 Sunday 11 September, Curzon Soho, 5pm

Title Sylvia Kristel — Paris, Director Manon de Boer, Year 2003 Country Belgium, Duration 39’ Format Digital, Audio French spoken, English subtitles Sylvia Kristel – Paris is a portrait of Sylvia Kristel, a Dutch actress best known for her role in the 1970s erotic cult classic Emmanuelle. It is also a film about the impossibility of memory in relation to biography and the inability to “plot” somebody’s life like a coherent narrative. In de Boer’s work there is often an evacuation of the visual image which gives way to a prominence of the soundtrack and/or voiceover. The filmmaker is consistently interested in unsettling the traditional hierarchy of image over sound, exploring the disjunctures between sound and image that are characteristic of cinematic modernity.

Sylvia Kristel — Paris + Maria Schneider, 1983

Duration 87ʹ, Format Digital, Audio English & Croatian spoken, English

Followed by a conversation with Elisabeth Subrin and Elena Gorfinkel Anyox

Anyosubtitles

Strikingly composed of 35mm and 65mm large format cinematography, Anyox tells the story of the small Canadian company town of the same name, abandoned by the Granby Consolidated Mining Company in 1935. The town was built to house a largely immigrant workforce from Eastern Europe who came to mine the rich nodes of copper discovered in the nearby forests and surrounding mountainscape. Save for two residents, the town of Anyox is now a desolate and uninhabited ghost town. The film shows us a landscape that has been

The starting point for Elisabeth Subrin’s Maria Schneider, 1983 is a 1980s TV interview with the French actress that Subrin encountered whilst developing a feature-length biopic about Schneider. The conversation with a journalist from Cinéma Cinémas takes a turn when Schneider is asked about her experience shooting the controversial Last Tango in Paris (1972) and decides to call out the film industry’s discriminatory practices. Re-enacted by actresses Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandoval (also an acclaimed director), each performance adds new layers to the original conversation, bringing it to the present moment. Ed Halter has previously written that Subrin’s work “presents the act of discerning between history and subjectivity as a necessary yet inherently impossible task, a project we are asked to undertake despite the knowledge that our findings will always be incomplete. Engaging with stories of women’s lives, Subrin embraces the contradictions between the empirical needs of feminist historiography and the radical unsurety of postmodern thinking.”

Director Jessica Johnson, Ryan Ermacora, Year 2022, Country Canada

Image still:

Title Maria Schneider, 1983 Director Elisabeth Subrin, Year 2022 Country France, Duration 24’ Format Digital, Audio French, English spoken with English subtitles

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Director Zhang Mengqi, Year 2021, Country China Duration 109’, Format Digital, Audio Mandarin spoken, English subtitles 7KM)

Sunday 11 September, ICA, 6pm Non-Aligned Film Archives: Ali au pays des merveilles (Ali in Wonderland) + Mes Voisins (My Neighbours)

Image still: Zi Hua Xiang: 47 Gong Li Tong Hua Image still: Ali au pays de merveilles

This programme begins a new series of screenings curated by Léa Morin and Annabelle Aventurin in collaboration with Open City Documentary Film Festival.

Sunday 11 September, Bertha DocHouse, 5.30pm Made within the context of The Folk Memory Project, Zi Hua Xiang: 47 Gong Li Tong Hua is part of an ongoing participatory documentary project exploring the personal histories of the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1961. Filmmaker and dancer Zhang Mengqi has developed an iterative filmmaking practice through repeated studies of life in 47KM, a rural village in Hubei Province named after its distance from the nearest city, Suizhou. In this film, Mengqi focuses upon her collaborative design process with a group of young local girls as they set out to create and build a new cultural centre within the village, to be named The Blue House. Imagined possibilities for the proposed building are rendered through a series of filmed performances and choreographic moments. These are interwoven with documentation of the design and build of the new structure.

“Through screenings, interventions and meetings, we will try to consider possible tools, methodologies, alliances and actions for a movement of non-aligned film archives. With international allies (venues, filmmakers, platforms) we will share a reflection and actions in favour of the preservation and circulation of a cinema in struggle against authoritarian narratives and models (colonial, state, capitalist, patriarchal, etc.), a cinema that struggles (or has struggled) to exist, and still struggles not to be pushed to the margins of the dominant histories” (Léa Morin and Annabelle Aventurin).

Zi Hua Xiang:47 Gong Li Tong Hua (Self-Portrait : Fairy Tale in 4

“On one of the village’s hills, a new space is coming into being, from children’s paper drawings to the solid ground, from a fairy tale to reality.”

Sunday 11 September,

African migrants in Paris talk about everyday life and racism on the labour and housing markets. The chanson from which the film takes its title sings of misery on people’s own doorstep. Hondo then switches to another mode to continue his analysis of social conditions/ Never has the post-colonial state of the world been summarised as succinctly as in the closing animated sequence. (Berlinale 2020)

ICA, 6pm

Ali au paysdes merveilles (Ali in Wonderland)

With an introduction by Annabelle Aventurin & Léa Mori With the support of Institut français du Royaume-Uni and presented in partnership with the Essay Film Festival Image still: Mes Voisins

Mes Voisins (My Neighbours) September, ICA, 6pm

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“Every image was filmed to hit you like a fist,” (Djouhra Abouda, in conversation with Guy Hennebelle, “Cinemaction”, n. 8, Summer 1979) in this experimental, political and radical film about the experience of immigrant workers in France in the mid-1970s. Ali au pays des merveilles (Ali in Wonderland) by Abouda and Bonnamy calls out the exploitation and racism it unflinchingly ascribes to the French state, the media, capitalism and colonisation, in a system of domination that grinds down those subjected to it. Shot in 16mm, the film combines a formal and aesthetic inventiveness with a powerful militant purpose through the direct dialogue of marginalised people. “I have explored the everyday actions of migrant workers through a magnifying glass,” says Djouhra Abouda (Tahar Ben Jelloun, Djouhra et ‘Ali au pays des merveilles’, “Le Monde”, 3 January 1977). It took a year of location scouting and research (Abouda reels off a long list of racist crimes from around 1975) as well as painstakingly detailed cinematic effects – jerky shots, distortion, double exposure, time gaps, and images in slow and fast motion. Images composed and set to music by Djamel Allam transport us from the realm of documentary to ballet (featuring refuse collection), musical comedy (highlighting weather, hardship and usury), and even fantasy,with superimposed faces on the gravestones of soldiers who died defending France between 1914 and 1918. The film also gives a voice to the forgotten ones: women, hitherto largely absent from films and documents about the struggles of migrant workers. The film was forgotten and remained invisible, a victim of its non-conformity with the two opposing currents of the day: interventionist (or militant) and experimental cinema, whose contours it had crashed.After this film, Abouda and Bonnamy abandoned cinema for other forms of expression. Alain Bonnamy, who was born in 1947, is an architect and photographer. Djoudra Abouda, who was born in Algeria in 1949 and arrived in France with her family in 1956, is known today as Djura, after Djurdjura, the Kabyle protest band she started in the late 1970s in support of women’s rights. (Léa Morin)

Director Med Hondo, Year 1971, Country France, Duration 35' Format 16mm (digital transfer), Audio French, Arabic spoken, English subtitles

Sunday 11

Director Djouhra Abouda + Alain Bonnamy, Year 1976, Country France Duration 59', Format 16mm (digital transfer), Audio French spoken, English subtitles

Onyeka Igwe: The Miracle on George Green

86 Sunday 11 September, Bertha DocHouse, 8.30pmcompulsively around the perimeter of Campo de Mayo, a visceral embodiment of psychic trauma. This is interwoven with a series of encounters, each reflecting upon the history of the site and considering different possibilities of what this contested location might become. Followed by a Q&A with Jonathan Perel With the support of Instituto Cervantes London Argentinian filmmaker Jonathan Perel’s practice focuses upon sites of trauma relating to the military dictatorship of the 1970-80s. Camuflaje takes as its site of investigation a detention centre known as Campo de Mayo. This new film is a collaboration with the Argentinian writer Félix Bruzzone, whose mother was interned and disappeared from the camp.

Bruzzone’s research acts as the core material in this film,as writer and filmmaker set out to engage with the now-abandoned site. Nature has taken over, but security guards remain. Core to the film is a series of shots of Bruzzone running Director Jonathan Perel, Year 2022, Country Argentina Duration 93ʹ, Format Digital, Audio Spanish spoken, English subtitles

famously managed to establish the status of a legal dwelling for a treehouse constructed in the boughs of the sweet chestnut tree. Igwe’s film draws from a range of different archival sources with a particular focus on reworking community videos documenting the campaign. Her film is screened alongside 4 of these community videos made by activist Neil Goodwin and by the alternative news group Undercurrents, which was formed during this moment. This screening centres around a new work The Miracle on George Green by artist filmmaker Onyeka Igwe. The film takes as its focus a campaign to save an old chestnut tree in Wanstead under threat due to the construction of the M11 link road in the early 1990s. The protests received national attention as environmental activists travelled from around the UK to join local groups as they fought to prevent the building of the road and preserve the area’s landscape and heritage. The campaign gained notoriety for both its scale and ambition as lawyers

Image still: Camuflaje Image still: The Miracle on George Green Londres

Camuflaje (Camouflage) 87 Sunday 11 September, Genesis Cinema, 8.45pm

Format Digital Audio English spoken 02. M11 Link Road –Wanstead tree eviction Dec’ 1993

Director Onyeka Igwe, Year 2022, Country UK Duration 12', Format Digital, Audio English spoken

Followed by a conversation between Onyeka Igwe and Ed Webb-Ingall

03. Th

“The powerful story of a community’s battle to save a much loved 250-yearold sweet chestnut tree in Wanstead, East London, from destruction by road-builders. This coming a few years after the Rio Earth Summit, when the UK government foolishly embarked on what they termed the biggest road-building programme since the Romans - 23 billion pounds of link roads, bypasses, orbitals, and motorways, thereby sparking a fierce eco-war throughout most of the 1990’s throughout Britain. The fight for this one tree helped to inspire an entire generation of environmental activists, and a huge shift in the wider public’s attitude to the car culture.” (Neil Goodwin)

“

Year

Country

The Miracle on George Green tells a collective social history of the UK tradition of the commons—land collectively owned and used to gather, play, and debate. The film centers around the George Green treehouse in East London. In the early 1990s, when the old sweet chestnut tree that housed the treehouse was threatened, various people including a group of schoolchildren wrote letters to the treehouse as part of a campaign to save it. From this story, Igwe’s film expands outward through archival materials from other social collective sites: Diggers of the 17th century, radical summer camps in Upstate New York in the 1930s and 40s, antiwar protests of Greenham Common in the 1980s, squatting communities of road protest camps in the 1990s, and the outdoor raves of the 2000s.”

Duration 24', Format Digital, Audio English spoken 01. Dear Tree - The Battle for George Green Sunday 11 September, Genesis Cinema, 8.45pm

Director Undercurrents, Year 1993, Country UK 12',

Image still: The Miracle on George Green

ouse

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“The six hour siege and eviction of Munstonia, the last of hundreds of houses to be demolished to make way for the M11 Link Road through London’s East End. Damon Albarn, from Blur, grew up just opposite. With music from RDF.” (Neil Goodwin)

Director Neil Goodwin, Year 1995, Country UK Duration 14', Format Digital, Audio English spoken e Last H

04. The Miracle on George Green

Director Neil Goodwin, 1993, UK,

Duration

This video was the first to be produced by alternative news agency Undercurrents and documents the eviction of protestors occupying the George Green sweet chestnut tree by Police.

(The High Line)

Followed by a conversation with Teresa A Braggs, Niki Kohandel & Shai Heredia Title Sab Changa Si, Director Teresa A Braggs, Year 2021, Country India Duration 77’, Format Digital Audio English, Urdu, Hindi, Kannada spoken, English subtitles

Denim Sky Director Rosalind Nashashibi Year 2022, Country UK, Lithuania Duration 67’, Format Digital Audio English, Lithuanian spoken, English subtitles

Followed by a conversation between Priyesh Mistry (National Gallery London), Rosalind Nashashibi and the participants of Denim Sky Title

Title Vivian’s Garden Director Rosalind Nashashibi Year 2017, Country UK Duration 29’, Format Digital Audio English, German, Spanish spoken, English subtitles

Denim Sky was shot in three parts over a period of four years between 2018 and 2022 in locations in Scotland, Lithuania and London with a cast featuring the artist herself, her two young children, and friends including Lithuanian artists Liudvikas Buklys, Gintaras Didžiapetris, Elena Narbutaitė, and Algirdas Šeškus, as well as Narbutaitė’s mother Daina Narbutienė, the British artist Matthew Shannon and the writer Rose Bretécher. A dreamy exploration of alternative community structures, the non-nuclear family and non-linear time, Denim Sky is concerned with love, intimacy and human relationships. Documentary strategies and direct cinema enfold into carefully constructed scenes in which Nashashibi applies her painterly eye to the framing of film images.

Title ... - then love is the name Director Niki Kohandel, Year 2022 Country UK, Duration 7’ Format Digital, Audio Silent Niki Kohandel’s reflection on education is an ode to the bonds that are formed by students at (and in spite of) the institution they are studying within. By weaving together 16mm footage from the 2021 anti-racist occupation of the Slade School of Fine Art with scenes from the install of the art school’s class of 2020 degree show, the academy emerges as a site of frustration as much as of achievement. Running over both events - from the final touches of varnish being put on a painting to protest banners being unfurled across the building - is text from former Slade student and tutor Christopher Kirubi’s poem “…then love is the name” from which Kohandel’s film takes its name.

Monday 12 September, Genesis Cinema, 8.35pm

... - then love is the name + Sab Changa Si (All Was Good)

Vivian Suter and her mother Elisabeth Wild are two Swiss-Austrian émigré artists living in Panajachel, Guatemala, where they have developed a matriarchal compound in an environment that offers both refuge and terror. Elisabeth is in her nineties and Vivian in her sixties, and they are as close as maiden sisters; in fact, the family relationship is shifting, and each is at times mother and daughter to the other. This film takes a close and dreamy look at their artistic, emotional, and economic lives with their extended householders.

Monday 12 September, Curzon Soho, 6.15pm Vivian’s Garden + Denim Sky

Shot in Bangalore over the course of 2019-20, All Was Good presents a collective portrait of contemporary Indian youth. Tracking the grassroots protests against the government’s controversial introduction of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, Teresa A Braggs’ first-person footage from the frontline of the movement captures the challenges in building solidarity across the nuances of intersectional identity on the street, in student living rooms, and in open assemblies. Set alongside the growing pains of a developing political consensus and personal kinships that navigate a diversity of genders, religions and castes are small moments of defiant joy, where unity can be found.

90 Image still: Vivian’s Garden Image still: Denim Sky

Workshops Talks &

Thursday 08 to Tuesday 13 September, Festival Hub 94 documentary. Training will be delivered by, Rebecca Day (Film in Mind), Helen Lawrie (Land & Sky Media) and Maria Takaendisa. Supported by the Film + TV Charity

As part of a 6-month training programme, Film in Mind will deliver two half-day workshops that will provide six selected participants with the basic skills needed to create, facilitate and run a peer-led support group for people working in Film MA (UCL). For students in higher education only. For details and to apply, check our website.

Student Pr

D ary Support Group – Facilitator Training

The Critics Workshop is an immersive six-day programme developed with the Another Gaze editorial team that will provide an introduction to the ethics and methodologies of a politically engaged film criticism for 10 selected participants. It will look at questions including the purpose of criticism, editing/the editor, formal experimentation, questions of ethics, and Critics Workshop

ogramme

LUX is the UK agency for the support and promotion of artists working with the moving image. Birds Eye View is a UK-wide charity that supports films by women & nonbinary people, with a mission to bring a broader perspective of the world through cinema.

Counter-Archives

Doc Society, LUX and Bird’s Eye View will be hosting one-to-one surgeries in the Festival Hub throughout the festival. Check our website for more details and to book your slot. Doc Society is a non-profit founded in 2005 committed to enabling great documentary films and connecting them to audiences globally.

Thursday 08 to Tuesday 13 September, Close-Up Cinema

ocument

Thursday 08 to Monday 12 September, Festival Hub How do alternative and independent archival initiatives draw attention to what has been lost, overlooked, reduced, suppressed, or omitted from national archives and established historiography? How do we resist erasure? How can the archive become a site of possibility, occupied in new

Thursday 08 to Friday 09 September, LUX Surgeries Thursday 08 to Monday 12 September, Festival Hub 95 the place of the “I” in criticism. Another Gaze is a feminist film journal, founded in January 2016 to provide nuanced criticism about women and queers as filmmakers, protagonists and spectators. In partnership with Another Gaze and with the support of a microgrant from the International Documentary Association.

Daily programme of free screenings and in-depth conversations with festival filmmakers, hosted by tutors from the Documentary & Ethnographic “Counter-archives” is a series of discussions and presentations happening throughout the festival’s Talks programme which propose expansive ways of thinking about the “archive”, considering not just the films themselves but also questions of labour, reparation and imagination.

With new modes of storytelling come new ways to traverse the boundaries of interaction between humans, machines and the natural world. Exploring what it means to work at these intersections, artists from our Expanded Realties programme will discuss their projects, how they the festival programme, this session aims to bring together creatives and curators to talk about documentary as a medium to imagine our own liberation. Rather than a “golden” age, how can we collectively conceive of a de-colonised, de-patriarchal and decapitalist age for cinema?

Dr Steve Presence is an Associate Professor in Film Studies at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol). Most of his work focuses on the film and television industries or on activist film culture, and he is the author and editor or several books, reports and peer-reviewed journal articles in these fields.

If I Could Wish for Cinema

Respondent: Dr Clive Nwonka (UCL)

Workshop: The Lifecycle of a Subtitle

In 2020, researchers at UWE Bristol published Keeping It Real, a report based on the findings of the largest survey ever conducted of UK feature-doc producers and directors. The findings evidenced what many of those working in the field already knew: that the UK is no longer supporting a fully functioning documentary ecosystem and much of the documentary community is therefore in a state of crisis.

From principles and planning, through discursive collaboration, to the managing and sharing of access resources, Matchbox will illustrate the practical and ideological underpinnings of ensuring accessible cinema and how producers, programmers and filmmakers can engage productively in the entire process.

Thursday 08 September, Festival Hub, 3.30pm-5pm 96 97 ways? As Olivier Marboeuf writes in the third issue of Open City’s journal Non-Fiction: “The restoration of an archive most frequently evokes the idea of a physical operation that allows the archive to be brought back to its initial form as closely as possible. But what of film archives that have disappeared for political reasons or become damaged in the margins of a dominant history of cinema and its accompanying industry? In this case it becomes possible to imagine not just a restoration, but a reparation, as a gesture that renounces the path backwards in favour of imagining another future based on the traces left by the work, its scars, the voices and lives that inhabit it and all their narrative potentialities. The act of reparation thus becomes a way to invent a new form as much as a new space for reception. A new life.”

Friday 9 September, Festival Hub, 1.30pm-3pm

Expanded Realities Panel

Friday 9 September, Festival Hub, 3.30pm-5pm

Hosted by Melanie Iredale and copresented with Birds Eye View

Keynote talk: From the ground up: a new infrastructure for the UK documentary film industry (Dr Steve Presence)

Presented by Matchbox Cineclub’s Sean Welsh and Calvin Halliday Matchbox Cineclub discuss and demonstrate in real time how access materials for films are created. Starting with an unsubtitled short, this workshop and live demonstration will be a study of how to create effective descriptive subtitles that balance the demands of accessibility against the intentions of the filmmaker and the integrity of their work.

Friday 09 September, Festival Hub, 11am-1pm were drawn to their subject matter, and the ethics and accessibility issues that arise when creating with frontier technologies. This conversation will be hosted by Emma Cooper (Innovate UK KTN)

Can we truly be in a “golden age” for non-fiction film while the types of documentaries we readily have access to are so limited? Birds Eye View invites a conversation about diversity in form over formula, how filmmakers are making films in their own way, and where we can find them. Taking inspiration from If I Could Wish for Something by Dora García, and other titles premiering as part of

It will explore some of the reasons

With: Annabelle Aventurin & Léa Morin (Non-Aligned Archives), George Clark & An Viêt Foundation, the Cinenova Working Group, Onyeka Igwe, Pablo La Parra, LCVA, the Sam the Wheels project, Tiffany Sia, the Temenos Archive, Bo Wang, amongst others. we got into this mess in the first place and propose some concrete ways out of it. These ideas were cocreated by the documentary sector and provide a roadmap to a more transparent, equitable, better funded and democratically organised UK documentary sector in the future.

Keeping it Real was followed by an extensive consultation process that generated a range of ideas about how to address the fundamental problems in the sector and build a sustainable, inclusive and innovative UK documentary industry. This keynote draws on this work.

Speaking Nearby aims to explore experimental ways of work and play with artists and archives. Rooted in an expanded idea of “archives”, Speaking Nearby draws on Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s concept in order to explore the means of articulating memories from the personal to collective and proposing new ways to care for history. The workshop is part of a long-term project developed through a growing circle of artists building bridges between different collections and communities to propose new and experimental approaches to archival and cinematic imaginaries. Initiated by London based artist George Clark, the project seeks to explore two distinct collections: the Vietnam Film with the risks of encounter, unsettling assumptions about the distinctions between host and guest, stranger and friend, self and other, documentarian and Participatingprotagonist.artists, writers and filmmakers, including Xiaolu Guo, Umama Hamido, Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Adam Christensen, will respond to Morrison’s reading in relationship to their own work and/ or contributions to the anthology. The event will be moderated by co-editor Therese Henningsen.

In Focus filmmaker Alexandra Cuesta will talk about her process and practice, focusing on documenting reality as an experiential, physical and subjective approach, thinking of form as a narrative device, and constructing the image as manifestation of the everyday. Alexandra Cuesta is a filmmaker and Image: Alexandra Cuesta

Speaking Nearby: P aying The Archive Workshop With George Clark, Linh Hà And The An Viet Foundation Archive

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Sunday 11 September, Festival Hub, 11am-1pm

Jonathan Perel Artist Cinema as Counter-Monument

Masterclass: Alexandra Cuesta

Sunday 11 September, Festival Hub, 1.30pm-3pm

Saturday 10 September, Festival Hub, 3.30pm-5pm

Talk:

Book Launch: Strangers Within

Saturday 10 September, Festival Hub, 12.30pm-2.30pm Institute (VFI) in Hanoi and the An Viet Foundation (AVF) in Hackney, which holds the largest known collection related to the Vietnamese-British community in the UK. This session will include a deep listening workshop led by musician Linh Hà and screening of work-inprogress films made by George Clark and discussion of the emerging An Viet Foundation archive. Together we will explore ways of playing with the archive - with a focus on notions of sound, collaboration and resonance - through which we can begin to speak with these complex histories, institutions and archival objects.

For the first event marking the publication of the anthology Strangers Within, we have invited contributors to respond to a recording of Toni Morrison reading her text ‘Strangers’, written in 1988 and reproduced in the anthology. Strangers Within is edited by Therese Henningsen and Juliette Joffe and published by the independent publishing house Prototype, to be launched on 1st October 2022 at Whitechapel Gallery. It explores the idea of documentary as encounter through essays, stories, and other responses by filmmakers, artists, and writers. The texts engage rigidness that condemns the viewer to a passive observation. They don’t aim to be everlasting, they tend to their own disappearance, insisting in their own impossibility to remember. A spectator who approaches cinema looking for memory will discover that the film transfers that responsibility back, as an enigma that is not meant to be solved.” (Jonathan Perel) In this artist talk, Jonathan Perel (Camuflaje) will discuss his practice through the idea of cinema as counter-monument. “Like monuments, cinema responds to a demand for memory by trusting in its own ability to remember the past. We fool ourselves by believing that a film can do that for us. But films as counter-monuments challenge this by trying to break the monumental photographer born in Cuenca, Ecuador who lives and works between Los Angeles and Quito. Her poetic films and videos combine experimental film traditions with documentary practices, and often comment on social diasporas and displacement. (see p. 6–19)

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In collaboration with LUX and the Ian White Estate, Open City is pleased to present the third Ian White Lecture, given by artist and writer Moyra Davey. This ongoing series celebrates the provocative and enquiring spirit of artist, performer, curator, educator and writer Ian White (1971–2013). The invitation to write and present a new lecture is extended to an individual whose work shares and carries forward this spirit. Since the early 1990s, Moyra Davey (1958, Toronto) has been making photographs, videos and publications exquisitely attuned to the overlooked,

T e Ian White Lecture 2022: Moyra Davey

Sunday 11 September, Festival Hub, 3.30pm-5pm poetic details of everyday life and objects. Davey has produced seven narrative videos including Hemlock Forest (2016), Notes On Blue (2015), My Saints (2014), Les Goddesses (2011), Fifty Minutes (2006). She is the author of Burn the Diaries, I’m Your Fan, Long Life Cool White, The Problem of Reading, and is the editor of Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood. Davey has been the subject of major survey exhibitions at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2016); Camden Arts Centre, London (2014); Kunsthalle Basel (2010); and Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (2008).

In collaboration with LUX, Open City Documentary Festival presents a new exhibition by Chinese artist, filmmaker and researcher Bo Wang. Now based in Amsterdam, Wang’s critical spatial practice incorporates film and video, new media, and installation. Hong Kong is a key site of interest, Wang explores how the city operates as a liminal space situated between the legacy of British colonialism and its contemporary connection with mainland China. Through his carefully observed studies in architectural design, and the organisation of urban space, he reveals latent systems of power. He uses a range of archival and contemporary found footage, setting visual systems against each other to pose questions surrounding the production and consumption of images. Through a series of recent essay films, made in collaboration with artist and researcher Pan Lu, his work examines colonial histories, trade and commerce, and systems of categorisation.

The Revolution Will Not Be Air-conditioned is a new work from Wang as he extends his practice into Exhibition in London; 19th-century terrarium prototypes used in the British Empire’s botanical trade; and 20th-century corporate salesforce training videos – the work reflects on how the mall as a spatial form evolved from its colonial root of conquest, to a machine of consumerism and social control. Yet, The Revolution Will Not Be Air-conditioned also pays close attention to how the intended outcomes of spatial design can be subverted, turning such insulated and sanitized spaces into a ground for political action and dissent. - Bo Wang The Revolution Will Not Be Air-conditioned was commissioned by Junni Chen, for the exhibition Lustrous Like Plastic, Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard College, NY.

The Revolution Will Not Be Air-conditioned Director Bo Wang, Year 2022, Duration 27' Image still: The Revolution Will Not Be Air-conditioned

103102 EXHIBITION –Bo Wang: The Revolution Will Not Be Air-conditioned

Sunday 04 September to Saturday 15 October, LUX Opening times: Wednesday to Saturday, 12pm-5pm Opening event: Sunday 04 September 2pm-5pm , LUX Bo Wang in conversation with George Clark (4pm) a careful study of the shopping mall, politicising this otherwise intentionally neutralised space. At this exhibition at LUX, Bo Wang’s work is situated within the context of Waterlow Park. Rare and exotic botanical species populate the gardens with views across to the City of London, the centre of the British colonial project. Bo Wang is an artist, filmmaker and researcher based in Amsterdam. His works have been exhibited internationally, including venues like Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art (New York), Garage Museum (Moscow), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Image Forum Festival (Tokyo), CPH:DOX (Copenhagen), Times Museum (Guangzhou), and Para Site (Hong Kong), among others. He received a fellowship from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in 2013, and was an artist-in-residency at ACC-Rijksakademie from 2017 to 2018 as well as at NTU CCA in 2016. He is currently a PhD candidate at Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam.

The title of this work was borrowed from social media comments in the midst of the 2019 Hong Kong anti-extradition protest, which originally references Black civil rights activist Gil Scott-Heron’s iconic 1971 poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”. The images of clashes between protestors and police in Hong Kong have constituted the most sensational memories of global turmoils in the last phase of pre-Covid age, which occurred, peculiarly, often against the backdrop of air-conditioned shopping malls. Taking this phenomenon as its point of departure, the work traces the architectural evolution of these retail complexes. Drawing from a range of historical references – including the Crystal Palace, built for the 1851 Great

Producers: Federico Biasin, Catarina ProductionMourãoStudio: My Boss Was, Laranja “ARuntime:Country:AzulItaly20minutes360immersivefairy

Director: Dominique Santana

“A Colônia Luxemburguesa is an interactive experience and discovery journey in which, strained between myth and history, we are confronted with many stories told from various angles and across different platforms.”

(Dominique Santana) Interactive Documentary Experience work from students, staff and alumni of University College London. We will have projects from faculties across UCL where XR is being implemented in fields including computer science, arts, and medicine.

A Colônia Luxemburguesa

Interactive Project Interactive Project Surfacing (AFFIORARE)

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The Subterranean Imprint Archive

Developer: Lachlan Sleight Country: Australia Runtime: 360 minutes (recommended viewing time 15 minutes) “Based on the world’s oldest tropical rainforest, Gondwana is a virtual ecosystem that evolves and changes over the course of a day’s exhibition in line with climate data projections.”

Director: Rossella Schillaci

“Tearless is part of a trilogy on camp town comfort women that the South Korean government offered to US soldiers stationed there. The film moves through the haunting spaces of Monkey House, a deadly medical prison established in South Korea in the 1970s to isolate comfort women with STDs.”

“A speculative interactive VR experience that addresses themes of reality, life, and the relationship between human, machines and nature in a post-human future where living in the physical world is no longer possible or needed. It narrates the mind transfer process of one of the last human’s biological consciousness, while an AI agent walks him through the transition.” (Arash Akbari, Farzaneh Nouri)

Directors: Arash Akbari, Farzaneh Nouri

Director: Gina Kim Writer: Gina Kim Producers: Zoe Sua Cho, Gina Kim

Producer: Bernard Michaux

“The Subterranean Imprint Archive is a VR experience made in South Africa. It situates the viewer in a counterarchive which traces the legacy of technopolitics in Central and Southern Africa, starting in Shinkolobwe, a mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the uranium used in the Manhattan Project was extracted.”

Production: Lo-Def Film Factory Co-produced by: Le Lieu Unique (France) & Electric South (South Africa) With support from: Prohelvetia Johannesburg Research: Joe-Yves Salankang Sa-Ngol Lead Developer: Kyle Marais

Developer: Arash Akbari Country: Iran, Netherlands Runtime: N/A

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Writer: Rossella Schillaci

Ut verit quibus dunditi onsentium et lique nosa saero beat landa nis maioriatet qui offictusam, coris porem rerspid etait un uciustiberum evendit, quas expe ne et eum reperit ipsae inis.

Production: Studio Samsa Film Country: Luxembourg Runtime: 5 <> 530 minutes

Producer: Rodrigo Moreira

Directors: Ben Joseph Andrews, Emma Producer:RobertsEmma Roberts

tale, set amongst mothers and children who live in prison. A magical journey in their everyday life, with animations of their surreal memories of the past and dreams for the future, created through a collaborative process.” (Rossella Schillaci)

Writer: Lui Avallos

Commissioned by: Oulimata Gueye for Le Lieu Unique Runtime: 15 minutes

Developer: Mundivagante Studio Country: Portugal, Brazil, France, Italy Runtime: 9 minutes

Our interactive documentary piece tells a screen-based story in a nontraditional format traveling across time, place and memory.

(Ben Joseph Andrews, Emma Roberts) Interactive Project

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(Francois Knoetze, Amy Louise Wilson)

Writer: Dominique Santana

360 Cinema Tearless

Writer: Arash Akbari

Handwritten Director: Lui Avallos

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Director C. W. Winters, Year 2020, Country USA, Switzerland, Duration 124, Format Digital Tuesday 08 September, 7.40pm, ICA Expanded Realities showcases storytelling at the intersection of art and technology. This year’s selection includes interactive web documentaries, 360 films and virtual reality experiences. The exhibition is free to attend and will be open at the Festival Hub from Thursday 08 – Tuesday 13 September: Thu 08 September, 11am–5pm Fri 09 September, 11am–5pm Sat 10 September, 11am–5pm Sun 11 September, 11am–5pm Mon 12 September, 11am–5pm Tuesday 13 September, 11am–2pm

Once upon a youth

Directors: Francois Knoetze, Amy Louise Wilson

UCL Showcase

(Gina Kim)

ExhibitionExpanded Realities

Production: Studio Mass Ornaments, Cyan Country:FilmsSouth Korea, USA Runtime: 12 minutes

“Archive material, 360° footage and artificially generated images are used to create a synaesthetic essay film about loneliness, insecurity and the increasing shift of our everyday life into the digital realm. Dystopic and anonymous stories merge in a collage of the disturbing social and political phenomena of our time.” (Lui Avallos)

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Gondwana

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Infomorph

estival

Meet filmmakers, industry professionals, and other attendees at our daily happy hour networking events co-hosted by festival friends and partners. Drinks will be provided by our sponsors Brixton Brewery and Bodega Bay Hard Seltzer. Check our website for more details.

Thu 08 September, 5pm–6.30pm Fri 09 September, 5pm–6.30pm Sat 10 September, 5pm–6.30pm Sun 11 September, 5pm–6.30pm Mon 12 September, 5pm–6.30pm Happy Hours Networking Festival Hub Café at China Exchange 32A Gerrard Street W1DLondon6JA

Location Venues Based at Curzon Bloomsbury Brunswick Centre, London WC1N 1AW WWW.DOCHOUSE.ORG THE HOME DOCUMENTARYOF The UK’s first cinema dedicated solely to documentaries, showing the best new releases, festival favourites and curated seasons, and nurturing a new generation of doc lovers. Festival Hub China Exchange 32A Gerrard Street W1DLondon6JA Bertha DocHouse Curzon Bloomsbury The Brunswick Centre WC1NLondon1AW Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image 43 Gordon Square WC1HLondon0PD Close-Up Cinema 97 Sclater Street E1London6HR Curzon Soho 99 Shaftesbury Avenue W1DLondon5DY Genesis Cinema 93-95 Mile End Road Bethnal Green E1London4UJ ICA (Institute ContemporaryofArts) The Mall St. SW1YLondonJames’s5AH LUX Waterlow Park Centre Dartmouth Park Hill N19London5JF Tate Modern SE1LondonBankside9TG

F H Festival Hub China Exchange 32A Gerrard Street HelpW1DLondon6JAyourself to a selection of teas, coffees and pastries at our Festival Hub Café. Open Thursday 08 to Tuesday 13 from 11am. FestivalLocationHub Café

Thu 08 September, 10.45am–6.30pm Fri 09 September, 10.45am–6.30pm Sat 10 September, 10.45am–6.30pm Sun 11 September, 10.45am–6.30pm Mon 12 September, 10.45am–6.30pm Tues 13 September, 10.45am–2pm

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Tickets to screenings can be booked online or in person at the relevant cinema venue. Tickets to our Talks and Workshops can be booked online only, this includes for individual events as well as the weeklong pass. For further information, please visit opencitylondon.com

Tickets & Booking

ub, Café & Happy Hours

At our Festival Hub you will find our information desk, Expanded Realities Exhibition, Festival Hub Café, and Talks Space. The building will be open daily at the following hours:

If you are a member of the press with a particular interest in any of the screenings, please andformarketing@opencitylondon.comcontactpressinformation,imagesinterviews.

Jooyeon (Trailer)

Laverne

Eva

Design) Ricardo

A number of screenings will feature descriptive captions. These are indicated in the programme pages in our festival brochure, but we also recommend checking our website for an up-to-date list. Additional screenings may feature descriptive subtitles as we work with filmmakers to offer the provision.

Tate Modern All events in the Starr Cinema have a step-free access route available, space for wheelchairs and a hearing loop. Works screened as part of the Starr Cinema programme will be captioned. Descriptive subtitles for d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing audiences

Bertha Dochouse There is a lift and step-free access to the screen, with 1 wheelchair space in the cinema. Close-Up Cinema There is wheelchair access and 1 wheelchair space in the cinema.

Curzon Soho All floors and screens are accessible by lift and there are currently spaces for wheelchair users in Screens 1 and 3. Genesis There is wheelchair access to the Foyer, Gallery, Café, Kiosk, Screens 2 and 3, Studio 4 and Studio 5. Screen 1, Bar Paragon and The Kitchen are accessible with the use of a wheelchair stair climber (maximum load: 150kg). Please call Genesis in advance to check which screen your film is playing in, or for more information.

E.J.

Laurence Avis (UCL Student Showcase programmer) Caprice (Marketing Manager) (Festival / Expanded Realities programmer) Palacios Cruz (Festival Director) (Director of Programming) (Branding and Matos Cabo (Tsuchimoto Noriaki retrospective programmer)

Passport

Rosi

Oliver Wright

Lucy Wardley

Hirst (Finance & Operations / Proof-reader) Sean Welsh & Megan Mitchell (Matchbox Cineclub) (Descriptive Subtitles) Shauna Blanchfield (Volunteer Coordinator) Siavash Minoukadeh (Festival Marketing Assistant) Will Swinburne (Technical Coordinator) Venue coordinators Marta Calderon, Elizabeth Dexter, Sophie Duncan, Ann Palomares, Max Tindley Programme advisors & pre-selectors Jonathan Ali, Salvador Amores, Wanling Chen, Jesse Cumming, Carmen Gray, Martin Grennberger, Shai Heredia, Anjana Janardhan, Chrystel Oloukoi, Audrey Pacart, Laura Staab, Emily Wright Texts Madison Brookshire, Laverne Caprice, George Clark, Cíntia Gil, Therese Henningsen, Melanie Iredale, Ishizaka Kenji, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Albert Millis, Siavash Minoukadeh, Ara Osterweil, María Palacios Cruz, Steve Presence, Charlotte Procter, Daniella Shreir, Lucy Wardley, Sean Welsh, Oliver Wright Team

Open City Documentary Festival strives to be as accessible as possible so please contact us if you have any access needs +44 (0)20 3108 6693 or email: info@opencitylondon.com

Producer

Accessibility Albert Millis (Expanded Realities programmer) Anna Stopford (Production Manager) Arzzita Nash (Guest Services Coordinator) Charlotte Procter (In Focus: Betzy Bromberg programmer)

ICA Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 are accessible via ramp. There is space for 2 wheelchairs in each cinema. Please let the ICA know about any accessibility requirements at the time of booking

109

Huda (Content Producer)

Lee

María

All festival venues are wheelchair accessible (see details for each venue below).

Wheelchair access

Dora Mckay (Events Coordinator) Lee (Technician) Coulibaly-Willis (Guest Services Assistant)

Awan

109108 as they may need to adjust the seats in advance. Both cinemas are fitted with induction loops for those wearing hearing aids. LUX The LUX building is fully wheelchair accessible and there are wheelchair accessible toilet facilities.

Open City would like to thank –FAMILY INDEPENDENTRUNCINEMA FOR MORE INFO GENESISCINEMA.CO.UKVISIT MEMBERSHIPTICKETSFROM£6FROM£40

Acción Cultural Española (José Manuel Gómez), Francisco Álvarez, Another Gaze (Daniella Shreir, Missouri Williams), Athenée Français Tokyo (Ikuko Takasaki), Auguste Orts (Marie Logie), Austrian Cultural Forum London (Vanessa Fewster), Erika Balsom, Sam Barry-Parker, Bertha DocHouse (Jenny Horwell, Nora Seelmann, Elizabeth Wood), BIMI (Matthew Barrington, Michael Temple), Birds Eye View (Christina Garcia, Melanie Iredale), Catarina Boieiro, François Bonenfant, British Council, Canada House (Simon Anderson), Canyon Cinema (Brett Kashmere, Seth Mitter), Max Carpenter, Denna Cartamkhoob, Marcos Pablo Centeno, China Exchange (Freya Aitken-Turff, Debbie Gerrard), George Clark, Kieron Corless, Courtisane Festival (Pieter-Paul Mortier, Ditte Claus), DAFilms (Christopher Small, Galya Stepanova), Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation (Susan Meehan, Haruna Takeda), Rebecca Day, day for night (Sonali Joshi), Jemma Desai, Diplomatic Representation of Flanders in the UK (Bart Brosius, Natasja Duhem), Doc Society (Fiona Fletcher), Ecuadorian Ministry of Culture and Heritage (Paulina Elizabeth Salazar Beltrán, Luis Gerardo Garcés Coronel, Jorge Alejandro Fegan Vasco), Echina Emodi-Okechukwu, Yannis Falconer-Johnson, William Fowler, Genesis Cinema (Laura Perrachon), Aaron Gerow, Cíntia Gil, Goethe-Institut London (Maren Hobein), Neil Goodwin, Elena Gorfinkel, Hama Haruka, Harvard Film Archive (Brittany Gravely, Haden Guest, Mark Johnson, Amy Sloper), Haus der Kunst Munich (Andrea Lissoni, Sarah Johanna Theurer), Go Hirasawa, ICA (Nico Marzano, Nicolas Raffin, Judith Wajsgrus), Instituto Cervantes London (Juan Blas Delgado), Institut français du Royaume-Uni (Clare O’Flaherty, Diane Gabrysiak), Kenji Ishizaka, Japan Foundation (Junko Takekawa), Kanatasha (Tokue Sato), Kiroku Eiga Hozon Center (Yuko Hamasaki), London Short Film Festival (Charlotte Ashcroft, Philip Ilson), LUX (Matt Carter, Benjamin Cook, Hanan Coumal, Sun Park, Charlotte Procter), Alfredo Mora Manzano, Olivier Marboeuf, Chie Moriwaki, The Mosaic Rooms (Rachael Jarvis), Ben Nicholson, Aily Tanaka Nash, National Film Archive of Japan (Alo Joekalda, Jo Osawa), Mike Sperlinger, Jelena Stojković, Adam Sutherland, Ikuko Takashaki, Tate Film (Valentine Umansky, Carly Whitefield), TIDF (Wanling Chen, Zoey Wu), Motoko Tsuchimoto, Matt Turner, UCL Anthropology (Wendy Chandler, Ana Ghica, Martin Holbraad, Keiko Homewood, Patience Mandozana, Rikke Osterlund), UCL Public Anthropology (Richard Alwyn, Laurence Avis, Dieter Deswarte, Ellen Evans, Rosi Hirst, Eleonora Passelli, Michael Stewart, Lucy Parker, Steph Patten, Chris Pettit-Mee), UnionDocs, Mark & Frances Webber, Ed Webb-Ingall, Henri Williams, Sakiko Yamagami All festival volunteers, all participating filmmakers, artists & speakers.

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117116 The Revolution Will Not Be Air-conditioned É Noite na América (It is Night in America) Critics ExpandedWorkshopRealities Exhibition The Revolution Will Not Be Air-conditioned DocumentarySurgeries Support Group –Facilitator FromCounter-ArchivesTrainingthegroundup: a new infrastructure for the UK documentary film industry Networking Happy Hour Xaraasi Xanne (Crossing Voices) Al-Yad Al-Khadra (Foragers) + An Excavation In Focus: Alexandra Cuesta 1 Al amparo del cielo (Under the Sky Shelter) Tsuchimoto Minamata—TheNoriaki:Victims and Their World Tsuchimoto Noriaki: Study Day Critics ExpandedWorkshopRealities Exhibition The Lifecycle of a Subtitle DocumentarySurgeries Support Group – Facilitator TheTrainingRevolution Will Not Be Air-conditioned Expanded Realities Panel UCL Public Anthropology Film Showcase If I Could Wish for Cinema Networking Happy Hour Combined Programme: Configurations Jet Lag In Focus: Alexandra Cuesta 2 Artistic Differences: It Has To Feel Real UnspokenMutzenbacherWords: An Evening with Maryam ExpandedCriticsCounter-ArchivesTafakoryWorkshopRealities Exhibition The Revolution Will Not Be Air-conditioned Wednesday 07 September Thursday 08 September Friday 09 September Saturday 10 September CurzonLUX Soho Festival Hub Festival Hub FestivalLUX Hub FestivalLUX Hub Festival Hub Festival Hub Curzon Soho Bertha DocHouse Close-UpICA Cinema BirkbeckICA Cinema Festival Hub Festival Hub Festival Hub Festival Hub FestivalLUXLUX Hub Bertha LUXFestivalFestivalFestivalGenesisICABerthaICACurzonClose-UpFestivalFestivalDocHouseHubHubCinemaSohoDocHouseCinemaHubHubHub Festival Hub Festival ICAFestivalFestivalGenesisBerthaCurzonClose-UpFestivalFestivalFestivalFestivalFestivalFestivalFestivalGenesisBerthaICAClose-UpBerthaCurzonFestivalClose-UpFestivalICAFestivalLUXFestivalFestivalFestivalICAGenesisCurzonGenesisTateICAFestivalTateClose-UpHubCinemaModernHubModernCinemaSohoHubHubHubHubHubCinemaHubSohoDocHouseCinemaDocHouseCinemaHubHubHubHubHubHubHubCinemaSohoDocHouseCinemaHubHub12-5pm11am-5pm11am11am8.30pm8.30pm8pm6.20pm6.15pm6pm5-6.30pm3.30pm2pm1.30pm12pm-5pmn/an/a11am11am-5pm11am10am-5pm8.30pm8.15pm6.15pm6.15pm6.15pm5-6.30pm3.30pm1.30pmn/an/a12-5pm11am-5pm11am6.30pm12-5pm 6.30pm11am-2pm11am8.35pm8.30pm6.15pm6pm5-6.30pm2.30pm1pmn/a11am11am-5pm11am8.45pm8.30pm6pm6pm5.30pm5pm5-6.30pm3.30pm3.30pm2.45pm1.30pm12-5pm11am11am-5pm11am8.40pm8.30pm8.30pm6.15pm6pm5.45pm5-6.30pm4pm3.30pm3.30pm12.30pm Speaking Nearby: Playing the Archive Book Launch: Strangers Within Combined Programme: What Rules The Invisible In Focus: Betzy Bromberg 1 Networking Happy Hour Tsuchimoto Noriaki: Minamata Revolt: A People’s Quest for Life In Focus: Betzy Bromberg 2 Combined Programme: Fire Spells Von Wegen “Schicksal” (Is this Fate?) Constant + The Making of Crime Scenes Robert Beavers: Recent Films Critics ExpandedWorkshopRealities Exhibition Jonathan Perel Artist Talk: Cinema as TheCounter-MonumentRevolutionWillNot Be Air-conditioned Masterclass: Alexandra Cuesta Si Pudiera Desear Algo (If I Could Wish for TheSomething)IanWhiteLecture 2022: Moyra Davey NetworkingAnyox Happy Hour Maria Schneider, 1983 + Sylvia Kristel—Paris Zi Hua Xiang: 47 Gong Li Tong Hua (SelfPortrait: Fairy Tale in 47KM) In Focus: Betzy Bromberg 3 Non-Aligned Film Archives: Ali au pays des merveilles (Ali in Wonderland) + Mes Voisins (My OnyekaCamuflajeNeighbours)(Camouflage)Igwe:TheMiracle on George Green Critics ExpandedWorkshopRealities Exhibition NetworkingCounter-ArchivesCounter-ArchivesSurgeriesCounter-ArchivesHappy Hour In Focus : Betzy Bromberg 4 Vivian’s Garden + Denim Sky In Focus: Alexandra Cuesta 3 Sab Changa Si (All was good) + ... - then love is the name Critics ExpandedWorkshopRealities Exhibition Tsuchimoto Noriaki: The Shiranui Sea Schedule Sunday 11 September Monday 12 September Tuesday 13 September

01 – An advanced practical programme that draws upon broad-based anthropological and critical thinking, providing deep practical knowledge of the craft of nonfiction filmmaking

02 – Creative and collaborative techniques are taught by leading practitioners from the UK’s performing arts communities at the new UCL East campus.

MA in Creative & EnterpriseCollaborative

04 – Led by a team of leading filmmakers including directors Sophie Fiennes (Grace Jones: Bloodlight & Bami, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema), Ellen Evans (Motherland, Country Girl), Dr. Sharone Lifschitz (The Visitor, The German Projects) and Grant Gee (Patience after Sebald, Innocence of Memories, Meeting People is Easy). For more information please ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/study/graduate-taughtvisit:

For more information please ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/study/graduate-taughtvisit:

03 – Receive training from experts sitting at the heart of this new, fast-moving media sector, and be part of the generation that shapes immersive factual filmmaking for the future.

01 – Students begin their enterprise during the course with small practical steps to deliver value and then implement iterative processes to create customers and grow a circle of interest in their product or service.

MA in StorytellingFactualImmersive

For more information please ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/study/graduate-taughtvisit:

MA Ethnographicin & AnthropologyatFilmDocumentaryPracticeUCL

For more information please ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/study/graduate-taughtvisit:

02 – Provides the tools to reconceptualise what documentary is and develop an understanding of documentary as research practise

MFA in AnthropologyPracticeDocumentaryCreativebyatUCL

This unique practical MA programme is based at UCL but run by leading film practitioners including Marc Isaacs and Richard Alwyn, and offers highquality practice-based learning in a top university research environment.

A practice-based MA for those who are starting innovative businesses where the way you do things and who you do them for is as important as what you do. It’s an application of creative practices to making and doing things that people need or want.

01 – Offers the choice of 2 filmmaking studios (‘Ethnographic and Documentary Film Studio’ and ‘Documentary Fiction Studio’).

03 – Students have their own camera equipment and editing suites year-round, and a dedicated senior film maker guiding them through their final graduation film.

02 – Students will produce 2 non-fiction films in various modes, developing a diverse portfolio of work, before producing a graduation film of 15-25 minutes in length.

03 –The programme draws on social theory and ethnographic practice from UCL Anthropology and enterprise models including Lean Startup.

01 – Provides students with a foundation in immersive factual storytelling formats - teaching filmmaking, spatial sound and post-production techniques for 360° VR and CG-based VR experiences.

Three new programmes are starting at UCL Anthropology in 2023 MA Sonic Design, MA Audio & & MA Hybrid Documentary. More details on our website.

Podcast

This programme, based within a university but run by leading immersive practitioners, gives you the practical tools and the confidence to become successful members of the international immersive VR/AR documentary community.

02 – Offers access to 360° filmmaking equipment throughout the year, alongside introduction to a wide range of the latest VR/AR and other immersive technologies.

03 – For students with some experience of filmmaking who are imaginative, risk-taking and intellectually engaged, wishing to push the boundaries in the field

A 2-year MFA providing all the technical and intellectual resources required to not just make outstanding non-fiction moving image, but to discover new ways of looking at the world.

September 15th - October 13th, £150 Led by activist filmmaker Mario Hamad, this course will prepare you to engage with the global injustices of the 21st century by focusing on the concepts and techniques of filmmaking, film viewing and film dissemination as forms of political action.

With Luke W. Moody

With Dr Mario Hamad

Making the Move into Directing for Television

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Open City Docs School –Autumn / Winter Short Courses

online courses: Militant Cinema & Activist Film

With Katie Buchanan

Based in UCL’s Anthropology department, our theory and practice-based short courses vary from political, personal, and experimental filmmaking, to sound recording, editing, and pitching. Find more information and book on our Selectedwebsite.upcoming

The Art of Industry: An Introduction to Documentary Pitching

Anthropology of Home With Dr Barbara Knorpp

September 19th - October 10th, £150 For practitioners looking to produce a market-ready pitch, this course offers a detailed overview of the forms of pitching preparation, written and visual materials, and tactics to approach funders and commissioning editors.

For general AtInstagram:Twitter:Facebook:info@opencitylondon.comenquiries:@OpenCityLondon@OpenCityDocs@OpenCityDocsOpenCityDocumentaryFestival, we take public health and safety seriously. There are currently no government guidelines regarding COVID-19. Should there be a change in guidance, we will adapt the festival accordingly. All information is correct at the time of going to press. Please check our website and sign up to our newsletter for the most up to date information: opencitylondon.com

September 20th - November 8th, £180 Aided by ethnographic examples from across the globe, explore the meaning of home and the role of anthropology in understanding identity and belonging.

September 21st - November 9th, £150 Led by RTS Broadcast and Grierson-winning Executive Producer Katie Buchanan, this course will give you the knowledge needed for making documentary films for a broadcast, online or theatrical release.

@opencitydocsopencitylondon.com

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Open City Documentary Festival creates an open space in London to nurture and champion the art of non-fiction cinema. We aim to challenge and expand the idea of documentary in all its forms. our screening programme, we bring together filmmakers and other practitioners to explore and debate the current landscape of documentary.

Alongside