We are delighted to announce the participants of the Another Gaze led Critics Workshop at Open City Documentary Festival 2026. Another Gaze was founded in 2016 to provide a nuanced forum for discussio...

This year’s Expanded Realities exhibition, A Sense of Space, brings together projects which explore the relationship between our senses and the environments around us using a range of media including ...

Celebrating the art of non-fiction, Open City Documentary Festival creates an open space in London to nurture and champion the art of creative documentary and non-fiction filmmakers.

Open City Documentary Festival creates an open space in London to nurture and champion the art of creative documentary and non-fiction filmmakers. The festival aims to challenge and expand the idea of...

Maeve Brennan’s Siticulosa is a captivating documentary that opens the audience’s eyes to a reality many may not be familiar with.

The 2025 Open City Documentary Festival is back at the beginning of May: this is our guide on 10 movies to watch, from world premieres to retrospectives.

Open City Documentary Festival creates an open space in London to nurture and champion the art of creative documentary and non-fiction filmmakers. The festival aims to challenge and expand the idea of...

In collaboration with the Ian White Estate, Open City is pleased to present the fourth Ian White Lecture, given by writer Esther Kinsky. This ongoing series celebrates the provocative and enquiring sp...

The debut feature-length work by Maxime Jean-Baptiste follows Melrick, a young teenage boy, as he spends a summer in French Guiana with his grandmother Nicole. The film traces conversations between Me...

This programme is a somewhat surreal – or childlike – attempt at telling a story of the 20th century. In a more serious vein, it relates to three different notions of cinematic temporality: it talks a...

Ecology and ecological encounters on and with the moving image surface as sites of inquiry throughout this year’s programme. In this panel discussion, moderated by artist-filmmaker Gerard Ortín Castel...

Unstable Rocks Ewelina Rosinska | 2024 | Germany, Portugal | 25’ | Digital | Sound Filmed with a Bolex camera, Unstable Rocks offers a meditative exploration of the Portuguese landscape, where geology...

Made as Indian-born filmmaker Chetna Vora’s examination film during her studies at the Film and Television Academy in Postdam-Babelsberg, Oyoyo (1980) was shot entirely within a student hall of reside...

Drawing from his experience as a fire-lookout in the Sequoia forests of the Sierra Nevada in California, Armand Yervant Tufenkian constructs a careful study of the visual documentation of forest fires...

Notes From Brook House  Alex Nevill | 2025 | UK | 28’ | Digital | English spoken  Airports, detention centres, sea containers. Slow, roaming shots linger on places of passage and confinement, where mo...

The Diary of a Sky Lawrence Abu Hamdan | 2024 | Lebanon | 44’ | Digital | Arabic spoken, English subtitles Artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan has a sonic research practice that acts to investigate human right...

An interview with Ant Hampton.

Desire leaves traces – on bodies, in memories, in the flickering frames of old VHS tapes. Les fantômes du hard is a journey through these remnants, an attempt to reconstruct a lost history of hardcore...

Listen with your eyes is an ongoing series of screenings that aims to create a space for children of all ages to engage with and enjoy experimental forms of cinema. Through a variety of techniques and...

The Mask is a film about the legacies of revolutionary ideals and a portrait of solitude and societal false selves, moving centrifugally around the life of Philippe, a homeless 23-year old man in Pari...

Join us to celebrate the publication of Non-Fiction 07: The Elephant, guest edited by Elhum Shakerifar. Imagined around the Sufi fable of the elephant, the journal proposes documentary as a process of...

Over a period of fifty years, Australian filmmaking couple Arthur (1938-) and Corinne Cantrill (1928-2025) sought to discover new visual languages and new ways of accessing and rendering landscape thr...

Join BFI Doc Society and artist filmmaker Rhea Storr for an open conversation about Rhea’s new moving image installation work Subjects of State, Labours of Love and her current path to developing her ...

Our Expanded Realities Programme this year showcases forms of non-fiction storytelling which go beyond a single screen. Projects using audio, publishing, scientific processes and video installations a...

A showcase of the films of multidisciplinary artist and DJ Christelle Oyiri aka Crystallmess. Born to Ivorian and Guadeloupean parents in the suburbs of Paris, Oyiri’s self-scored video art explores t...

In 1966, the Japanese government announced plans to build an international airport near Tokyo, in the rural areas of Sanrizuka and Shibayama. This decision was imposed on local farmers without consult...

Guangzhou-based artist, filmmaker and publisher Qin Dao will present On Kino, a self-initiated film theatre and moving image archive all maintained in his own living room. Taking a media archaeology a...

What does accountability look like? In recent years, the answer has been overwhelmingly forensic.   From the news to true crime podcasts, and from art exhibitions to film festivals, forensic modes of ...

This programme brings together recent work by the Marseille-based filmmaking collective, the Film Flamme association, with videos produced in East London by the community arts initiative, The Basement...

Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya Malena Szlam | 2024 | Australia, Canada | 20’ | Digital | Sound The latest in a cycle of films by Chilean artist and filmmaker Malena Szlam examining volcanic l...

Pioneering Lebanese director Jocelyne Saab is best known for her films about the Lebanese civil war and Palestinian resistance, but she turned her camera to many subjects beyond her native Lebanon – m...

What does accountability look like? In recent years, the answer has been overwhelmingly forensic.   From the news to true crime podcasts, and from art exhibitions to film festivals, forensic modes of ...

In Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, we are invited to see how the arts play a vital role in the lives of the brave and spirited Haitian community. Against a backdrop of poverty, violence and fear...

A monumental essay-film that proposes a history of the United States through the prism of the life and career of actor Henry Fonda, who famously played Abraham Lincoln and is perhaps best remembered a...