MyStreet: Your Story Told Through Film - Competition Launch

Open City Docs' online film channel MyStreet is gearing up to launch its 3rd annual documentary filmmaking competition from Between the Lines Festival (Rich Mix, London) with a free screening on Saturday 2 March 2013, 5pm.

Each year, MyStreet runs a competition where they shortlist the best 10 films about a UK location submitted in the past 12 months. It is a way of encouraging people to make films about their locality, by whatever means, and add to the living archive of everyday life.

'Our Nations Sons'' Scott Willis for Mystreet

These films are available to view online and act as part of the MyStreet community - an ever evolving slice of life, linked to the MyStreet map, searchable by postcode or town. 
Anyone around the world can upload a film about any location, but only those about a UK location will be eligible for the competition (see terms and conditions).

The deadline for MyStreet film submissions is Wednesday 15 May 2013. Shortlisted filmmakers will receive an access-all-areas pass to Open City Docs Fest 20-23 June 2013 where their films will be screened and judged by the Open City Docs Fest Jury chaired by Jeremy Irons (Actor & Producer, 'Trashed'). The three best MyStreet films will be awarded at the festival too!

'What the Neighbours Saw', by Danny Weinstein for MyStreet

“Between the Lines Festival is all about exploring the boundaries of documentary, which are shifting all the time. MyStreet is a kind of citizen journalism so it makes sense to bring that to a festival like Between the Lines that explores the challenges facing documentary makers in the new media landscape. We’re really excited to be launching this year’s MyStreet from there,” says Michael Stewart, Founder of Open City Docs Fest and MyStreet Director.

'55 Seconds' by Jan Cawood for MyStreet

MyStreet 2013 Launch + Screening 
@ Between the Lines Festival

SATURDAY 2 MARCH, 5pm-6.30pm

Location: Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA.
Click here for map.
FREE ENTRY.

INTERVIEW WITH FILMMAKER MARC ISAACS: ‘We are looking to live a life that is better’

We caught up with Marc Isaacs ahead of our Open City Docs Special Screening of The Road: A Story of Life and Death at AV Hill Theatre, UCL this Wednesday 6 February 2013.

The Road: A Story of Life and Death, produced by the BBC's Storyville documentary strand, sees director Marc Isaacs focus on the humanistic stories of immigration through character portraits of those living along the A5, an old Roman road which runs from Holyhead to Marble Arch in London.

A judge on last year's Open City Docs Fest Grand Jury, Marc Isaacs has made more than 10 creative documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4 since 2001. His films have won Grierson, Royal Television Society and BAFTA awards, as well as numerous international film festival prizes. Marc also teaches documentary filmmaking at the NFTS, LFS and Royal Holloway.

With a filmmaking style that is distinguished by its empathetic approach, sense of humour and moments of profound intimacy, The Road: A Story of Life and Death is a revealing insight into the hopes and dreams of those who come to London in search of a better life.


What got you interested in documentary in the first place?
I kind of fell into it. I never had a plan to go and become a documentary filmmaker. It comes down to curiosity about the world and observing. I guess I’d always felt like a little bit of an outsider and just observed and wanted to look at things closely. But having curiosity and wanting to listen would be the main thing.

You were on the Grand Jury for Open City Docs Fest 2012 - what was your highlight of the festival?
Yes. Two films stood out: 5 Broken Cameras and the Italian Summer of Giacomo, which were both up for the Grand Jury prize, which I really liked. Everyone else rooted for 5 Broken Cameras but I liked the latter with long takes about a deaf boy in the summer, which was very, very different but I suppose the political agenda will be fitting to what traditionally people have looked to in documentary. But it’s not always the case for more subtle films.

What impact do you think The Road will have on the public's perception of those who come to London in search of a better life?
I would hope that despite individual circumstances, to show that fundamentally we are looking to live a life that is better, which it is a fairly universal thing, to look for a sense of home and the lengths we go to get there.

I suppose London is the Babylon of identities and demonstration of lives you might choose to lead?
Yes, exactly. And it’s this variety and diversity of existence which make things interesting.

How did you choose your characters and what kind of a planning did you do for the filming of The Road?
We did a lot of research about that stretch of the road. At one point we had three researchers who wanted to be a part of it and helped and we spent a lot of time, hours walking up and down that road, talking to people, listening and just seeing who and what there was. I had read a book on immigration and got in touch with the author who then turned out to have an even more fascinating story of his own and we asked him to be in the film.

What’s it like being a parent as well as a pretty prolific filmmaker?
I think this question should be asked of the mothers who are documentary filmmakers! It’s always good to have a balance and I’m lucky that I have a lot of understanding. I have a daughter who is 4 and a son who is 22 so there is a big gap. He’s come along and helped me on a few shoots and he’s studying film now, without an idea of what he wants to do.

Any advice for emerging filmmakers out there?
Yes, to not let the absence of funding deter you from getting your story. Doing things non-traditionally may get you looked over by distributors who will find it difficult to sell if it doesn’t fit into that industrialized template, so if you have to get an extra job to do it then that’s what you do. I would say borrow, steal or get a camera and make your film. Ten years ago the equipment wouldn’t have been cheap enough to just go and buy but of course that’s possible now and the absence of needing much of a crew should help you get your story. There is a lot of interesting work being made outside of the restrictive funders format.

What have been the biggest changes in documentary filmmaking?
The big thing that has changed documentary is television. The absence of a three-part narrative means that the more interesting or different ways of looking at life get lost because they are funded in that industrialized way. Unless it’s a format, which makes crude judgments of poor people, it’s difficult to make something with a slightly different agenda. There are people who still support interesting work, BBC is one and someone at Channel 4 who might take an interest, but anything which is not much like Hollywood gets looked over. I’m lucky to have a producer to have picked up and ran with the idea even before I had a real idea of what it was going to be. You’re sitting down and trying to convince someone to help you when you yourself can’t even be sure of what the final film will actually be.

What are you working on next?
There are a few things I’m working on but I can’t really talk about them yet.

Interview by Gloria Lin.

OPEN CITY DOCS SPECIAL SCREENING
The Road: A Story of Life and Death

Marc Isaacs / 2012 / UK / 75’

WEDNESDAY 6 FEBRUARY 2013, 7pm
Location: AV Hill Theatre, UCL, Malet Place WC1E 7JG -  Click here for map and directions.
Tickets: £7 / £5 (concession) Book here >>

The Road: A Story of Life and Death will be in cinemas from 22 February 2013
CERT: PG

Submissions still open!

Calling all documentary filmmakers! 

We'd like to say a big thank you to all those who have entered their films so far in the 3^rd edition of Open City Docs Fest. We're very excited by the kaleidoscope of work coming in from passionate filmmakers all over the world! 

The Regular Deadline has now closed, but there's still a chance to be part of a festival that embraces quality films across genre divides - at home and from homes away from home. So let's keep 'em coming!

Late submissions will be accepted until Monday 4 March 2013. 

To enter your work, simply head to www.opencitydocsfest.com and go to ‘Submit your film’, click the ‘Withoutabox’ icon, and follow instructions. Don’t miss this chance to join the growing community of filmmakers showcasing their talents in a four-day celebration of documentary.

We're interested in films that push the boundaries of what documentary means, from reportage to experimental films, and those that blur the line between fact and fiction.

Any length, any subject matter, from anywhere in the world. From shorts to features, Open City Docs Fest screens films that step beyond current broadcast conventions, and through a programme of workshops and discussions focuses on the craft, storytelling and the collective challenges of filmmaking.

Award categories for 2013 include Grand Jury Award, Best City Film, Best Emerging Filmmaker (UK and International), Best Short Film, Best MyStreet Film, and new thematic awards.

Check out some of last year's selected films here and learn more about how your own documentary can be featured in this year’s collection of dramatic, entertaining, challenging, and thought-provoking films.

The 2013 Grand Jury is chaired by Jeremy Irons (Actor & Producer 'Trashed'). This year's jurors include Anne Applebaum (Pulitzer Prize winning author of 'Gulag' & 'Iron Curtain'), Molly Dineen (BAFTA Award-winning Director and Producer), Malcolm Grant (President and Provost, UCL), Briony Hanson (Director of Film, The British Council), Hanka Kastelicova (Executive Producer of Documentaries, HBO Europe), Kim Longinotto (Sundance Award-winning Director of 'Divorce Iranian Style' and 'Pink Saris'), and Elizabeth Wood (Founder and Director of DocHouse).

Our third edition will take place 20-23 June 2013 again in UCL and various venues across central London. 

If you'd like to start a conversation, or have any questions, get in touch - write to info@opencitylondon.com or call +44 (0)20 7679 4907.

Welcome to the 2013 edition of Open City Docs Fest. We're kicking the new year off with a special event at the ICA on Tuesday 8th January to get things rolling ahead of our main festival in June.  

Artists documentary: Elegies for Ideologies is screening as part of the London Short Film Festival.  This screening forms a part of our Open City Docs Specials we will run throughout the year in different venues around London, and with our festival partners.

The films explore nationhood and power by turns, through science fiction in Remnants of the Future by Uriel Orlow / Armenia/UK / 2010 / 21’ , the relationship of Europe and the Middle East through a fictitious and lavish feast, in Trespass the Salt by Larissa Sansour and Youmna Chlala / 2011/  Lebanon, Palestine, UK / 11. 

And what happens when the children leftwing activists in the UK grow up in Rachel Garfield's The Struggle/ UK / 2012 / 20’. 

A elegiac counterpoint to the interviews of ex-GDR teachers in marxism today (prologue) by Phil Collins / Germany / 2010 / 25’

 Larissa Sansour, Uriel Orlow and Rachel Garfield will be in conversation to discuss their works with Open City Doc's Treasa O'Brien at the event and tickets can be purchased here.

Open City 2012 Curtains Down

What a pleasure it has been to have had over 130 films over four days in our second year. 

AV Hill Cinema Photo: Gloria Lin

Festival Hub, torrington Place Photo: Gloria Lin

The 2012 Open City Docs Fest was an awesome success. Thanks to the faith of the audience and ordinary wanderers in, by trusting and just going with the spirit of adventure in the programming that Ollie Wright, Lisya Yafet and Treasa O'Brien took. It introduced documentary as cinema, as art and performance and the possibilities that spiral out of engaging documentaries as a serious and rich category that challenges  itself as an artistic form as well as engaging new and wider audiences.

Grand Jury Chair Nicolas Philibert announcing Open City's 2012 Winner of the Grand Jury Award. Photo: Gloria Lin

    

As a genre that pushes technological capabilities, documentary film-making tells stories in tandem with fast changing formats at a grassroots level. In the case of 5 Broken Cameras, 2012's winner of the Grand Jury Award, it became an analogy for the filmmaker's relationship to their camera in embodying the story in five episodes within their smashed up gear. We've seen some unbelievably aesthetically stunningly poetic films, with inventiveness which pushes docs into the realm of cinema, designed for singular justice on the big screen.

Award Ceremony 2012 Photo: Gloria Lin

We've seen the impact of Doc in A Day and MyStreet in inspiring would-be filmmakers and the next generation and moving the goalposts of access to filmmaking. This initiative which runs year round for regular people who want to make work about their localities, put their film on an online platform for public access. Judging by the kitted-out, mini-me film crews running around with unbridled smiles from our South London Schools, perhaps we're changing  a little of how stories are told  -and what we expect a filmmaker to look like. MyStreet was looked after by the Mystreet Team Olivia Bellas and Steph Patten who also made the festival sonically stimulating.

Designer Anthony Jones logs onto MyStreet   Photo: Gloria Lin

Highlights included the Il Capo Re-scored (triple-scored?) in the Cinema Tent with an epic Ennio Morricone-style rampage with live strings and electric guitar in contrast to Strangelove's minimal, zero low-end electronica reverie. Open City is the only place where you'll get a cognitive neuroscientist explaining syntheathesia in film music with the film composer for Steve McQueen's 'Shame' - on the same panel as Anil K, Imogen Heap's crocodile-clip customised guitarist-cum-choirmaster.

Elvis is still in the building         Photo: Gloria Lin

 The joy of having a dedicated documentary film festival which is non-industry and geared towards getting people into making film and watching collectively has always been the brainchild of Dr Michael Stewart who founded and established the whole festival . Filmmakers mentioned how they felt freer to engage in open dialogues with their audience, often leading onto bigger questions as their raison-d'etre of being here, with post-film discussion spiralling way beyond alloted times. This was seen so evidently in Jessie Teggin's efforts in bringing together some incredibly dynamic panels, meshing people from different disciplines, practices and professions to give shades of grey to informed opinions on difficult social matters.

The queue for our Closing Gala feature documentary, McCullin by Jacqui Morris Photo: Gloria Lin

Amidst the Closing Gala order/panic Sabrina Dridje kept the show on the road and production managed everything to Volume 11, Gail Cohen brought her extensive BFI expertise to get the message and philosophy out there, with Talia Cohen giving a beautiful performance in the Festival Hub. Amber Dobinson owned the marketing of the festival and is the reason you got the links and the news. Josefeen Foxter was responsible for pretty much winning the best sartorial style and hair category, as well as looking after the insanely hardworking crew of Open City Docs Fest volunteers whose time and efforts are quantified in innumerable ways.

Cinema Tent midnight take down or 'Open city: The Play' Photo: Gloria Lin

Aine Cassidy rocked the design and look of all our brochures, sites and graphics. And Paul at thedodjocreative.com, if not for whom this site could not exist. Jacob Harbord dealt with crazy volumes of requests from moi for comps and looked after our box office again. Bert Hunger was our technical manager and the man in black who made the pictures happen.

Other amazing quotes from some of 2012's travelling filmmakers: Simone Casanova made The Strawberry Tree in 20 days by roaming around by himself in Cuba. He is currently blending fact and fiction in Rome.

Simone Casanova of A Strawberry Tree (left) in a sodium light halo

Steve Maing l does not like New York City cockroaches that crawl like brown prawns inside his shoes. Gwanelle Gobe can speak Chinese and can moonwalk. (See below).

Filmmaker Gwanelle Gobe (right) is simply excellent at rocking these MJ moves Photo: Gloria Lin

Adam Isenberg has an extensive background as a Catalan linguist, has an almost analogue soul with an enviable 1st generation Nokia, loves painful Turkish Youtube comedy. Despite these things, A Life Without Words was one of the most transformatively poetic films of this year.

Lights up, Light down, Open City Docs Fest Photo: Gloria Lin

So here we are at the end. We're waltzing away, but we're not going far. .....See you in at Open City Docs Fest 2013.

Email us at Open City, for an Open relationship: info@opencitylondon.com   Ta ra for now.

Open City Docs Fest: Thus Far.. Join us for Final Day Films!

 Your Story Told through Film, MyStreet Screening, films made by MyStreet Photo: Gloria 

Its our last day!  Open City is privileged to have an engaged, enquiring and curious audience, plunging head first into new worlds. Yesterday's highlights included Punk In Africa which sold out to all of London's old-school scene, absolutely delighting Director Keith Jones. Evolution of Violence on Guatemalan daily brutalities was standing room only. Mark Le Fanu with the Guardian and Sight and Sound had high praise for the Wajda School in Warsaw of three shorts including Piotr Berna's Papparazzi. Aesthetic Queeries was led by our producer and programmer (with a knack for entendre) in a screening of queer lives over at the ICA.

Director Steven Maing and Producer Trina Roderiguez of High Tech, Low Life Q&A

There have been great discussions, humble, intelligent and humourous by turns and I've learned a hell of a lot. I was lucky to drop in on Steve and Trina of High Tech, Low Life dealing with great Qs with great New York eloquence in response to their screening, which deals with the amorphous and ill-defined area of Chinese censorship inter-generationally. Through the eyes of two bloggers who connive (via blogging in the voice of a cat to evade authority) they reach out to places where actual legal terms don't seem to be known by anyone. They made this film over 4 years dealing with over 500 hours of footage (with 100 generated by the bloggers). China under brief scrutiny, appears a adolescent conundrum of post-modern, post-communist ideological practice.

The programming this year, by a ceaseless Mr Oliver Wright has been so excellent that rounds of re-screening have been requested on our final day! Most films on this final day at Open City Docs Fest are still bookable online and in person at our Box Office on Torrington Place WC1E 6EQ. All films are on THIS PAGE. Do it now before you kick yourself for having slept through Open City in 2012.

Some films to check out, Gwanelle Gobe's 'This Space Available' looks at how advertising permeates our public spaces - and what can we do do de-saturate our streets of images and adverts that sell us stuff? She examines the arguments and approaches of street artists, activists and politicians around the world who are fighting to “reclaim the streets” from advertisers. Join in and reserve your space here.

Eggs For Later is a personal documentary about 

Marieke Schellart, the director who is in her mid 30s and wants to have children, though not having found the right guy yet. This is about fertility technology and perhaps, a meditation of what time can mean. Your Eggs for Later are here.

Living a stone's throw from London's first market street to be lit by electricity in 1880, Brixton's Electric Avenue, its easy to forget how this revoluntionised  every aspect of modern life. Jerome le Maire's doc, Tea or Electricity tells the epic story of an isolated village in the Moroccan High atlas going through this process over three years and the changes it makes in the face of modernity. Along electric lines, Chris Paine's Revenge of The Electric Car charts the race of General Motors, Nissan, and Tesla Motors to make the electric car. Thought provoking in how our desire for autonomy might deal with its costs.

Volker Sattel's Under Control has its London Premiere, giving us a tour of Germany's nuclear power plants and the story of the German atomic age. It explores the convoluted and site specific islands of growth and its prisms of places and sites. Get your tickets here.

The Open City Bar, a popular destination for the discerning doc fest goer  Photo: Gloria Lin

Agonizing over film schedule in front of The ARUP cinema in the Festival Hub Photo: Gloria Lin

A Preview of the feature documentary McCullin will be closing the Gala tomorrow at 6pm. I was moved by the rough cut, and unexpectedly unsettled again upon each viewing when I working on it as a production manager earlier this year. The sheer power of Don McCullin's photographs carry an intensity and format much copied now. I was 19 when I arrived at his work as an Eat Asian politics student through Horst Faas, the Magnum coterie of Capa, Riboud and Larry Burrows etc. Though, with McCullin, the ethics, feelings and cost of documenting human conflict resonated differently, perhaps on a biblical level through certain images.

This is a doc which is very straightforward. Covering his early years in deprived London, shot on 16mm with natural light, Alex Baranowski, fresh from a double Olivier award nomination scored the film, a brilliant dude in all senses of the word creates something haunting in accompanying the images.  A testimony carried by a reflection; the things  he as saw as a man - and the things he saw as a photographer.

 The film examines the golden era of photo-essays and adventurous journalism on the Sunday Times, Don McCullin had a creative freedom backed by Sir Harold Evans of the Times to bring back the true costs of conflict of Cyprus, Vietnam, Cambodia, later prevented by Murdoch's ascension in media. McCullin would travel into the field with twenty rolls of film only, making each frame count. It meant something deeper, without the modern luxury of disposable digital frames. Something of the preciousness of decisions made at split second moments, as unrepeatable as in life.

 McCullin raises debate around the idea of a 'war' photographer and the issues of censorship, picture editing and interference present in so much of our media today. Within the context of the ongoing Levenson inquiry, it brings up the same themes and characters of Fleet Street in questioning the true freedom of our press.
[Please note MuCullin has now SOLD OUT]

There might be one more post from me after this, when you've joined us for a beer or three by the Cinema Tent. Hope to see you tomorrow.

Sound Waves and Day Two at Open City

Last night, we opened the Fest with an experimental edge befitting of Open City Docs Fest documentary adventure in performance, curating and programming. 

With Marina Abramavic's 40 year career documented by Mathew Akers continuing to move the hearts of skeptics, we created an expansion of cinema through the London Contemporary Voices live sonic performance to Ancarani's Il Capo (of which I feel glad to be a contributing female tenor). Day two of Open City Docs Fest saw frantic activity across all our festival sites, UK Shorts, Slade's Artist Moving Image taking honorable mentions. 
Plus, a packed out, standing-space only Cinema Tent for The Strawberry Tree which I mentioned in previous posts below, with Simone Casanova's camera dwelling on a languorous, poetic Cuban reverie.

The Strawberry Tree, Simone Canasnova, The Cinema Tent    Photo: Gloria Lin

 Sound Waves is Open City Docs Fest's strand that traverses the aural landscape, in a wide circumnavigation - including documentaries exploring FC Judd's experimental music and radio maniuplation of the 50s and 60s in Practical Electronica,  a symphonic doc by Tess Girard exploring the synchronicity of sound, a nurse meditating on the final pulses of a life to a theoretical mathematician citing scientific synchrony, an omnipresent, universal pulse emergent in A Simple Rhythm. 

 The horror of losing the ability to hear music if you are a dancer, music critic or pianist- is losing a language as well as a primary sense, Lindsay Dryden's of Lost and Sound asks if our ears, brains and selves could let music can find us again in these conditions.

 For more participation, coming up is the workshop The Sound of Documentary, in conjunction with the School of Sound with a panel of composers and directors on how aural sensation evokes half the story on film. This may get you to reconsider choices and whether we really ought to stick to editing to twee jangly pianos on all our short films.

I was moved beyond, well words in the AV Hill screening of Adam Isenberg's A Life Without Words on the universal need for a language. With patience and observation, we watch the painstaking process a deaf sign-language teacher (who is also deaf herself) teaching three intelligent, uneducated deaf children who have no spoken words, sentences or self-created 'home-signs'; for feelings or objects. She visits them again and again with picture cards. 

A Life Without Words

The girl resists, walking away, tortured with ambiguity in whether she wants public and private language - or not. We itch for progress. It didn't surprise me to hear others in the screening moved to crying at the end of this film. I thought about A Life Without Words in relation to Wittgenstein's basic philosophical conundrum. Here, certainly it presented the possible cruel reality of 'the limits of my language are the limits of my world'.

Aesthetically sensitive, with hand drawn fonts, humour, eye-rests of chickens, cows, dogs and the insane beauty of the Nicaraguan agri-landscape, the whole pace of it seemed to place the viewer in an intimate position of care - time taken to divine the thoughts and motives of people who seek understanding but cannot be understood, by a lack of tools to communicate.

Audio-typed by a 230wpm typist for the debate after A Life Without Words with the Director Adam Isenberg with Dr Greg, Linguistics Photo: Gloria Lin

 Adam Isenberg studied linguistics. A native of California, residing in Turkey and like myself, has an unplaced accent and vocabulary slightly at odds with a presumed background. Despite mutual fluency in English perhaps, how many times have we had to clarify, well what do you mean? This realm of exploring how words shape our existence lead the audience into an unexpectedly passionate discussion of voices, agency and signs. In particular, the challenges of how he dealt with filming deaf subjects and ethical consciousness in documentary filmmaking

 Steve Maing of High Tech Low Life observes 1am revelry  Photo: Gloria Lin

Continuing that theme of ethics is a workshop, “When I start a new film, the less I know about the subject, the better I feel. In other words, what guides me is my ignorance. What does it talk about? Sometimes I simply don’t know...” says Open City Docs Fest’s Grand Jury Nicolas Philibert, Director of Être et Avoir and Nénette and Open City 2012's Chair is a filmmaker whose approach is based on the ethical question of filming the Other. He examines subject distance and limits at a workshop here.

London Contemporary Voices, Il Capo Re-Scored, Yuri Ancarani

More than anything, we'd love for you to experience curiosity and change beyond the screen.

For those of you that missed the London Contemporary Voices' re-score of the poetic Italian doc, Il Capo, you can hear the sonic fantasia again on Sunday with other sound designers/composers who reworked the film to different emotional effect. Open City's audience are growing to love heavy-duty engineering docs. Join in the love affair here.