Open City Documentary Festival will host its tenth annual festival this year, bringing together filmmakers, industry professionals and film enthusiasts from the UK and globally to celebrate the art of documentary filmmaking.

In response to the pandemic, this year’s edition will take place entirely online from 9 to 15 September, and will be the first available to access internationally. The programme features 48 new films and 10 cross-media projects, with 54% of the selected filmmakers being women or non-binary.

Among the festival’s three world premieres, three international premieres, five European premieres and 29 UK premieres, highlights from the European productions include Valentina Pedicini’s Faith [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Valentina Pedicini
fiche film], Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed's Purple Sea, and Mehrdad Oskouei’s Sunless Shadows [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film], all of which featured at prominent festivals this year and the last.

Special events this year will be live-streamed on evenings across the festival, featuring innovative performance lectures, ‘live storytelling sessions’ and augmented sound work. The Industry Programme will include masterclasses and panels on a variety of timely subjects for the documentary world, such as 'Confronting the Colonial Gaze', 'Questioning Authorship' and 'Complex Access’.

Programmes will be accessible through Open City’s unique streaming platform, in partnership with Festival Scope and Shift72.

Open City Docs was founded at University College London by the academic Michael Stewart in 2010, as a means to celebrate the art of non-fiction and support filmmakers working in creative documentary.