Set in a former Russian labour camp, IMMORTAL observes various youth groups in the town of Apatity preparing for a national holiday; Heroes of Fatherland Day. Director Ksenia Okhapkina poetically captures the harsh, industrial landscape of the town, echoing the dominan...
Sisters! opens in a way that many films end. On a visitor sign-in sheet a group of individuals write their name, time of arrival, expected departure, and job title. The list reads: ‘photographer’, ‘artist’, ‘assistant’, and ‘sound’, evidently Petra Bauer and her film c...
Set in Addas Abba, Ethiopia, Anbessa tells the story of a boy named Asalif living on the periphery of a new collection of condos; on the periphery of wealth and modernisation. Displaced by the development, we see the impact of this change through Asalif's eyes. He uses...
When I was small, having played the illustrious if questionably-costumed Planet Earth in a school play (let’s just say I’d made continents out of egg cartons), I was heavily concerned with Saving the World. This is a notion that I carried with me, even if subconsciousl...
Delphine and Carole directed by Callisto Mc Nulty documents the pioneering French/Swiss feminist video collective Les Insoumuses (the name is a combination of "insoumise," translates as disobedient and "muses") focusingon the friendship of two of the founding memb...
In 2003, Catherine Hardwicke’s directorial debut had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Thirteen revels in the giddy highs of the budding friendship between two young girls, Tracy (Evan Rachel-Wood) and Evie (Nikki Reed). Tracy spends her spare time baby...
‘I was at the Metropolitan Museum with all my friends […] we all went into the temple of Dendrur and looked at all the hieroglyphics and I looked around and realised that all this stuff, something that was so everyday for people at the time, all of it was in the MET no...
As an urban geographer my research and teaching is oriented around relationships between gender, sexualities and cities. My research doesn’t tend to focus upon film, and I would not profess to be an expert on the Agnés Varda or New Wave cinema but it’s been a pleasure...
“Some people just take the room they need, elbowing out intruders to take possession of a space. [...] The magic of authority, money, penises.” Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men
When watching The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest, award-winning film, I was remin...
Well, actually, there is. Evelyn Garner (Betty Schram) comes off the field having made a mistake to then receive a tirade of abuse from drunken manager Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) and she reacts with tears at which point Dugan (memorably) shouts the "There's No Crying in B...
For the first time in the 55-year history of the British sci-fi show, “Dr. Who” is a woman. For the uninitiated, the show’s titular character—“The Doctor,” as she is credited these days—is an alien who journeys through time and space having adventures. She travels in a...
Two girls swim playfully in the pool. It’s nothing particularly extraordinary. Not even when one asks the other not to wet her hair. It’s not an unusual thing to say, after all. As the story unfolds, however, it becomes clear that while for one girl this is just a game...
Documentary maker Penny Lane has two feature films at this year's Open City Documentary Festival; Our Nixon (2013) and The Pain of Others (2018). Our Nixon uses snippets from 500 reels of Super 8 home videos captured by members of President Richard Nixon's administrati...
Already met with its fair share of controversies, Beata Bubenec’s third focus on the Ukraine, Flight of a Bullet is a documentary unlike most others. Consisting of a single take, the film depicts an 80-minute slice taken from a much larger volume of recordings the Russ...
Open City Docs provide year-round academic and practical courses to teach, explore and facilitate forms of non-fiction filmmaking from the experimental to the established. Their annual film festival is a celebration of these forms, of emerging directors, global voices...