Audience

Over 5600 people attended the 2022 festival. 59% were attending Open City Documentary Festival for the first time.

47% of audience members intended to attend between 2–5 events at the festival.

53% of audience members at screenings work in the Film industry and the second largest industry represented was Education (17%).

18% in full-time education, 9% in part-time education.

79% of audience members currently live in London with 10% coming from the UK outside London and the remaining 9% travelling internationally to attend.

Beautiful screenings, amazing staffextraordinarily kind, caring and attentive. This is an impressive festival.

(Audience Member)

Wish I could see all of the films! Well done!

(Audience Member)

The 2022 edition of the festival received press coverage from outlets such as Hyperallergic, Sight & Sound, Modern Times Review, Senses of Cinema, Capital Celluloid, Film Carnage, MUBI Notebook, Art Monthly, Dime, Aesthetica, Cineaste Magazine, Film Comment, Business Doc Europe, Londonist, Time Out and Realscreen.

It Is Night in America is an expiring ‘camerabody’, its pulse moves in and out of focus, in and out of light. I would like to say it offers hope of a re-attunement of human and nonhuman natures, but I can’t get the yawning darkness glimpsed at the tail end of the cascade’s relentless plunge out of my mind. It was screened at Open City Documentary Festival at Curzon Soho on 7 September 2022.

(Maria Walsh, Art Monthly)

[On Betzy Bromberg] The recent retrospective of her work at this year’s Open City Documentary Festival in London was the first in-depth study in the UK of her five decades of filmmaking, which has veered over the course of her career from the personal to the transcendental.

(Caitlin Quinlan, MUBI Notebook) London’s Open City Documentary Festival is back. The event nurtures and champions filmmakers working in non-fiction cinema, and this year’s programme features an eclectic and illuminating line up of projects.

(Aesthetica)

[On Tsuchimoto Noriaki] The documentarian’s powerful films about the brutal effects of modernisation in Japan are marked by a desire to make films with and not about vulnerable people.

(Becca Voelcker, Sight & Sound)

The festival’s great glory is its series of comprehensive retrospectives dedicated to filmmakers of different generations from different parts of the world, with works screened where possible in original formats (a sad rarity these years). […] If the festival celebrated only old filmmakers, it could be accused of nostalgia or worse. Its celebration of past excellence, however, is designed to generate a continuum within which emergent talent can situate itself. Two new films from South America stood out from a strong program: opening-night screening It Is Night in America by Brazilian Ana Vaz, and Camouflage by Argentine Jonathan Perel.

(Darragh O’Donoghue, Cineaste Magazine)