Open City Documentary Festival 2015: A Preview
The annual Open City Documentary Festival returns to London on 16-21 June! This year’s festival includes a broad selection of films from all over the world, in a variety of documentary styles. There will be film screenings, live events and workshops taking place in venues all over London.
For inspiration for budding filmmakers, there are four diverse shorts programmes taking place at Open City Docs Fest this year. As we all know, short films can be a great “calling card” for filmmakers to show off their talents! ‘Drawing from Memory’, a collaboration between London Short Film Festival and Animate Projects, will take place at the quirky Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury. This event will explore the boundaries between documentary and experimental animation, featuring shorts such as ‘Feeling my Way’. This should be a fascinating event for filmmakers who are curious about combining animation with ‘traditional’ documentary methods.
‘A Smart Portrait of London’, taking place at Hackney Attic, is a multimedia event including snapshot presentations and discussions about big-data, open-source, planning, designing and documenting cities. This event would be of particular interest to anyone curious about the information collected by organisations such as Uber, Transport for London and others who track our digital movements and activities.
There are also numerous films being screened which tell important stories about social injustice in the 21st century. In ‘The Divide’, based on the best-selling book ‘The Spirit Level’, director Katherine Round shows us how inequality shapes our societies by using personal testimonies from a variety of contributors from both ends of the income scale. ‘Estate, A Reverie’ gives a voice to residents of a Hackney housing estate who are often stereotyped by media representations.
The festival includes over 50 screenings, workshops and events over five days, so it’s worth checking out the full programme here.
Information on Industry and Student accreditation, which gives access to special masterclasses and screenings, is available here.
For more information, contact: julia@opencitylondon.com
This blog post was written by 1000 Londoners Young Ambassador, Julia Brow.