On Resistance: The 15th Open City Documentary Festival

Since its launch in 2014, Open City Documentary Festival – based within University College London’s (UCL) Public Anthropology program – has been dedicated to nurturing non-fiction cinema, supporting the next generation of filmmakers, and fostering dialogue between academics and creative communities in London. Amid the dramatic shifts in global geopolitics, the 2025 edition of Open City (6–11 May, London) places the concept of resistance at the core of its program, presenting nuanced perspectives on its diverse meanings and practices across the world. While the term is often associated with political action, the definition is variable: resistance can range from the collective to the individual, from organised social movements to subtle everyday gestures.¹ To address the diverse definitions, Open City approaches its key curatorial theme by offering a series of participatory experiences – including screenings, interactive workshops, live performances, lectures, and immersive media – creating a space for critical reflection and affective engagement.

The opening films, An Excavation (2022) and Siticulosa (2025), by London-based artist-filmmaker Maeve Brennan, explore resistance as expressed through cultural testimonies embodied in artefacts as part of local histories and ecosystems. In An Excavation, two forensic archaeologists attempt to reconstruct ancient Apulian vases from the 4th century BC recovered from a Geneva antiquities dealer. As they examine the fragments, the film traces not only the illicit trafficking networks that brought the vases to light but also the layered cultural testimonies contained in each break and shard. These fragments bear witness to the local histories and human activities embedded in the material remains. Siticulosa traces these artefacts back to Puglia, in southern Italy, surveying caves and tombs and engaging with the symbolic landscape and the local residents connected to it. Together, the films examine how these artefacts transcend their status as passive objects, manifesting a kind of “independence or aliveness” that contributes to – yet is often overlooked in – the shaping of local history and cultural heritage.²

An Excavation

A wide spectrum of the Open City 2025 program engages deeply with political cinema that confronts dominant systems – ranging from colonialism and state violence to the visual politics of feminist, queer, and underworld sexualities – as vital expressions of resistance. 

The special program Sanrizuka: Notes on a Struggle focuses on the social movement that swept across the titular rural community in the Greater Tokyo Area in the early ‘60s, when local farmers resisted the Japanese government’s plan to build the Narita International Airport on their land. The section explores a decades-long resistance movement and anti-capitalist solidarity, as well as its post-1968 political imaginaries and influences on global resistance movements. The movement united farmers, workers, students, and grassroots activists – including the Farm Women’s Action Corps, elder farmers, Youth Action Teams, and New Left students – in a collective resistance that delayed the airport’s construction for years. The struggle’s intensity, marked by fortresses, tunnels, and confrontations with police, evolved into a sustained commitment to land and community – or more precisely, the “politics of the soil,” as noted by the program’s curator Ricardo Matos Cabo. It then fostered intergenerational solidarity and inspired transnational movements like France’s Larzac. 

In spirit, tactics, and global impact, Larzac closely resembled Sanrizuka. Threatened with expropriation for the planned expansion of a military base on their plateau, the farmers of the Larzac region in southern France similarly refused to vacate their land. Like Sanrizuka, Lazarc became an enduring symbol of resistance, spawning a movement that lasted for years and was immortalised in several documentaries, some of which were widely distributed and played a key role in spreading its message. One of these, Koyama Osahito’s The Spring of the Great Offensive (1978) emphasized solidarity between the two movements. The film – whose French version was produced by ISKRA, a French film production and distribution company founded by Inger Servolin with support from filmmaker Chris Marker to promote political cinema and documentaries created by groups such as the Medvedkine Groups and other labor and revolutionary movements in France – saw Lazarc and Sanrizuka as connected fronts in a global struggle against state violence, capitalist expansion, and land dispossession. Unlike Sanrizuka, which could not derail the airport’s construction, Larzac ended in a major victory, with the military base project cancelled in 1981.

The program presents documentaries, archival footage, and documents that chronicle four decades of resistance. Directed by Shinsuke Ogawa, Dainitoride no hitobito (Narita: Peasants of the Second Fortress, 1971) captures a pivotal moment in the conflict: the forced land expropriations of the late 1960s. Its long takes immerse viewers in the visceral reality of farmers building fortifications and clashing with authorities. The film’s strength lies in its portrayal of community, as the camera follows women leading protests, elders sharing wisdom, and students confronting police, revealing the social bonds that fuelled the movement. Chris Marker, who wrote the script for Bénie Deswarte and Yann Le Masson’s Kashima Paradise (1973), another Sanrizuka film, described such works as capturing history “like a time-lapse flower,” a sentiment echoed in Peasants’ ability to freeze moments of collective defiance. If Peasants of the Second Fortress, as well as Sanrizuka: Heta buraku (Narita: Heta Village, 1973), capture the movement’s heart – its people, their land, and their defiance, The Spring of the Great Offensive (1978) and The March of the Earth (1981) highlight its radical evolution. The program’s inclusion of experimental and archival works, like Fūkei no shimetsu (The Extinction of Landscape, 1971) and footage of the three-day Gen’yasai outdoor concert held by the movement in August 1971, enriches its scope, showing resistance as both political and artistic. The festival’s inclusion of archival rushes and slides from 1978 fosters a sustainable approach, making these materials accessible for research and inspiring new generations of activists and filmmakers.

While the festival offers a compelling portrayal of the Sanrizuka struggle and its resonances with Larzac, the program might have been further enriched by exploring Sanrizuka’s broader regional and global influence – not only in terms of political resistance, but also to filmmaking methodologies. This is particularly relevant within Asia, where similar struggles emerge from the entanglements of authoritarian governance and capitalist development in shaping land, community, and state–citizen relations. 

  A notable aspect of the works in the Sanrizuka series is their commitment to solidarity as well as ethical filmmaking as developed by Ogawa Productions, a filmmaking collective founded by Shinsuke Ogawa. The filmmakers lived together with the farmers, who were fully aware of the filming but also actively engaged in it, including the editing. As a result, the films convey a strong sense of intimacy: the filmmakers appear close to the farmers, and these, in turn, are visibly at ease in front of the camera. While the series often highlights Ogawa’s role and the collective ethos of Ogawa Productions – sometimes overshadowing the contributions of individual members – it is refreshing to see Open City’s inclusion of works by Koyama Osahito and Fukuda Katsuhiko, a former member of the collective. It is also worth noting that Ricardo Matos Cabo’s curation of the Sanrizuka program embraced an open-source, collaborative approach. Among the contributors was Aikawa Yoichi, who was born into a farming family in Shibayama – one that participated in the protests and lived in the very community where Ogawa Productions created the Sanrizuka series. Sanrizuka, as presented, is more than a historical struggle; it’s a living testament to resistance. 

Narita: Peasants of the Second Fortress

While the Sanrizuka series offers a realistic portrayal of radical resistance against state power, Guangzhou-based artist, filmmaker, and publisher Qin Dao adopts a more nuanced approach, engaging with neglected archives while subtly challenging the dominant exhibition infrastructure in China. Open City screened Qin Dao’s 16mm Xixuegui Dianying (A Vampire Film), which was followed by a conversation with Bo Wang titled On-Kino: The Afterlives of the Obsolete, which traces Qin’s journey as a multidisciplinary artist and the development of his central project, On-Kino, an independent screening space and moving image archive located in his living room.

Founded in 2017, On-Kino has hosted regular screenings of rare, forgotten, and orphaned films in obsolete formats such as 16mm, 35mm, 8.75mm, Super 8, and VHS – most of which were discovered and collected by Qin himself.³ The filmmaker said he completed A Vampire Film in 2016 but was unable to find any venue willing to screen it. Hence, he founded On-Kino. It is worth noting that the Chinese central government enacted a new Film Law in November 2016, which forbids the exhibition of uncensored films in public venues. In this context, the founding of On-Kino functions as a subtle yet significant act of resistance against state-imposed regulations in the exhibition sector.

A screening night at “On Kino” (photography by Qin Dao, 2022)⁴

Solidarity with Palestine emerged as a central theme within the political cinema strand of Open City’s program, addressing one of our most urgent and visible struggles. As a festival, Open City demonstrated its commitment on an expansive scale, offering a diverse range of screenings – such as Antonia Caccia and Maysoon Pachachi’s 1989 Voices from Gaza; Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan’s 1969 Palestine vaincra (Palestine Will Win); and Eitan Efrat and Sirah Foighel Brutmann’s 2023 Un Âne – panel discussions, and VR presentations.

Among these, The Land of Common Disgrace exemplified Open City’s dedication to participatory experience and its bold challenge to traditional non-fiction forms, inviting audiences to engage directly in the filmmaking process. Devised by Palestinian-Egyptian-British artist and filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky, the project was staged in the open space of Fishtank Workshop as a re-enactment of a 2024 trial related to Farouky’s pro-Palestinian activism in Britain, which resulted in a guilty verdict for criminal damage. The filmmaking process was open to the public, allowing activists, artists, and community members to participate in recreating a trial in which Farouky had been prevented from articulating political views, particularly those tied to his Palestinian identity: 

“I was continually cut off. And I had this, this obsessive replaying of those moments in my mind. And the only way I found to get out of it was to sort of imagine a filmic version of the trial, where I very dramatically said what I wanted to say.”⁵ 

The Land of Common Disgrace (photography by Pedro Blattman)

Responding to the crisis in Gaza and Lebanon, Lisabeth Subrin’s Manal Issa (2024) doubles as a cinematic refusal to conform to easy narratives and present trauma as spectacle. During the ongoing violence in Gaza and Lebanon, Subrin and Lebanese-French actress Issa forged a transcontinental collaboration that became as much about the process as the product: a film shaped by and in war. 

For over a year, Subrin and Issa spoke regularly via Zoom, FaceTime, and voice recordings while bombs fell in the background. Their conversations were punctuated by air raid sirens, interrupted by silence, fear, and the invisible weight of violence. Subrin’s film pushes back against the structures that demand visibility on their terms. In doing so, it echoes Issa’s career, a performer constantly asked to embody roles written, filmed, and shaped by men, only to be critiqued by the same patriarchal gaze. The film is informed by Subrin’s long-standing engagement with the politics of representation. For Subrin, documentary is not just about showing the world but revealing the gaps in how the world is shown. Manal Issa operates in that gap. It’s about voice, identity, and the internal contradictions of being mis-seen. Subrin’s approach – intimate, experimental, and ethically rigorous – rejects spectacle in favour of solidarity. Manal Issa stood out as a film that embodied resistance not just in subject matter, but in form.

Manal Issa

As such, whilst women filmmakers are often marginalised in the landscape of political cinema, Open City, in association with Jocelyn Saab Association, presented a rare look into Saab’s later documentaries – films shaped by a tender female gaze that meditates on exile and displacement, on the joys and struggles beyond her native Lebanon. Through these films, produced primarily for French television after Saab’s relocation to Paris in the early 1980s, the program revealed a different facet of the director’s filmmaking, which was formed by exile and cultural displacement: a shift away from the immediacy of frontline reportage toward a reflective struggle with memory, loss, and survival. Saab, renowned for her fierce and intimate coverage of the Lebanese Civil War, underwent a profound shift after the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut. What followed was not a retreat, but a redirection, a new battle fought through film. Her documentaries from this period trace the contours of absence, cultural erosion, and the complex task of preserving identity in the face of displacement. A standout in Saab’s Egypt – Disappearing Worlds program, The Architect of Luxor (1986), follows Egyptian architect Olivier Sednaoui as he revives traditional mud-brick construction in southern Egypt. Through this portrait, Saab addresses the political instability and cultural amnesia of Mubarak-era Egypt. It’s a contemplation on the erosion of heritage, one that mirrors her mission to preserve what history and power threaten to destroy. Though these films were produced within the institutional framework of French television, they remain personal, experimental, and politically sharp. There is a persistent dialogue running through Saab’s work: between past and present, East and West, homeland and host country. Her lens becomes a site of translation. Open City spotlighted her works not only for their formal innovation but for how they relentlessly trace the quiet machinery of erasure, the systematic disappearance of histories, traditions, and communities. Saab does not document loss in abstract terms; she gives it texture, voice, and memory. 

The Architect of Luxor

By pairing film screenings with a workshop exploring Saab’s archives, the festival found an innovative way to bring audiences closer to her filmmaking process. It invited viewers to move beyond passive reception and step into the intricate labour of preservation, translation, and political memory that defines her cinema. By opening up her archives, the festival honoured Saab’s legacy not just as a filmmaker, but as an archivist of cultural resistance.  

Al’Alma’ (Belly Dancers)

“Dancing with Images and Film,” a workshop held in collaboration with Braquage and the Jocelyne Saab Association, and curated by Elhum Shakerifar and Mathilde Rouxel, offered a multidimensional foray into the world of film archiving, restoration, and reinterpretation. More than an educational event, the workshop served as a site of communal memory, creative reactivation, and a reflection on Saab’s archival past. Participants from film studies, moving image, archiving, and filmmaking backgrounds contributed to a space that merged pedagogy, preservation, and artistic collaboration, and turned the archive from a static repository into a living, active place of creative interaction.

Through a process of exploring 16mm and 35mm footage, navigating projection mechanisms, selecting sequences, and re-contextualising them, a new film was created from Saab’s rushes. In addition to learning about Saab’s legacy, participants had an opportunity to participate in its continuation. A shared cinematic space was created by reanimating the fragments of Al’Alma’, Belly Dancers, a 1989 documentary Saab made in Egypt. In the end, a new collaboratively edited version of Al’Alma’ was assembled from the original rushes, reimagined by artists and thinkers of the new generation. The reassembled film premiered as part of Jocelyne Saab’s Egypt, 1976–1989 program, which also screened a newly restored selection of Jocelyne Saab’s films for the first time.

Pictures from the workshop “Dancing with Images and Film”

Drawing from the work of avant-garde Austrian artist Valie Export, Open City also frames resistance as a feminist act of both creation and spectatorship. Export’s films, by showing bodies in action and defying norms, break the cycle of passive consumption and provoke thoughtful engagement. To mark the launch of How to Do Things with VALIE EXPORT, a new publication on her filmic practice by the Austrian Film Museum (Vienna) and Spector Books (Leipzig), the festival screened a selection of her films. The program was accompanied by Q&As and panel discussions that delved into Export’s moving image and expanded cinema work and its enduring impact.

Valie Export’s oeuvre seeks to redefine the relationship between the artist, the camera, and the audience. In Self-Portrait with Head (1966-67), Export’s early exploration of her body as a medium sets the tone for her oeuvre. The film uses her head as a sort of canvas, manipulating its visual representation to question identity and objectification. This corporeal focus evolves in Adjungierte Dislokationen (Adjunct Dislocations, 1973), where Export straps a camera to her back while holding another in her hand, capturing her movement from multiple angles. The resulting footage, graded and layered, creates a “technically reconstructed whole”⁶ that foregrounds the process of filmmaking. Her body’s entanglement with the camera, choreographed across staircases, reflections, and rooms, grants viewers unmediated access to her creative act, blurring the line between artist and artwork. Syntagma (1984) pushes this further, using fragmented imagery and mixed media to explore the body’s role in cultural signification. Export’s presence is constantly reimagined through frames, TV screens, and in-between spaces, reflecting her refusal to treat the body as a stable, “natural” entity. Instead, she positions it within technical apparatuses, revealing its signifying potential.

Syntagma

Adjunct Dislocations

I Turn Over the Pictures of My Voice in My Head (2008) extends this playfulness, incorporating voice and image to probe memory and perception, with Export repositioning herself across cinematic fields. Her deliberate coverage of every angle, front, back, and side creates a dynamic interplay between bodily performance and technology, inviting viewers to engage actively with the film’s construction. The festival’s Q&As and panels, including discussions on Export’s moving image work, emphasise this dual action, encouraging audiences to interrogate cultural representations and political histories. The book project, How to Do Things with Valie Export, emerging from a prior symposium, positions her as a filmmaker whose materiality and semiotics inspire active engagement, distinct from the Actionists’ shock-driven approach. Compared to last year’s edition, which focused on women filmmakers, 2025’s programming broadens the lens to include historical figures like Export alongside contemporary non-fiction works. Exports’ works activate, challenge, and inspire scholars, artists, and audiences as a living manifesto that continues to tackle themes like gender politics and bodily autonomy. Her focus on the female body in public space, confronting fascism and patriarchal structures, demands active spectatorship, compelling viewers to confront the body’s role in resisting oppression.

Compared to the more overt forms of resistance seen in political mobilisation, everyday resistance is often overlooked. This year’s Open City program offers a nuanced exploration of the varied forms that everyday resistance can take. Christelle Oyiri’s video art works employ an innovative methodology of archiving everyday Black diasporic and digital youth culture, particularly through music and dance, which mobilise sound and the body to break silence. Drawing on found footage, TikTok videos, and 3D animation, her works navigate the space between the forgotten cultural memory and the racialised spectacle of blackness in modern society, bridging the gap between “here” and “there.” In Collective Amnesia: In Memory of Logobi (2022), Oyiri celebrates the overlooked history of Logobi, an Ivorian folk dance that originated on the streets of Abidjan and became woven into the fabric of public spaces in Paris. The film reveals the political potential of dance and music as cultural legacies that reclaim public space, challenging their relegation to the realms of entertainment and club culture. Through these embodied performances, the Black French diaspora asserts agency over its cultural heritage, reclaiming both space and visibility. Moreover, in actively watching the dancers, the Black local audience within the scene is no longer a passive spectator. They reclaim the agency of their gaze – a gaze that is not only oppositional, resisting imperialist and racialised narratives, but also affirmational, directed inward toward each other’s everyday practices, creativity, and potential. This way of looking becomes a form of collective recognition and empowerment, transforming music and dance into a shared cultural and political gesture.

Collective Amnesia: In Memory of Logobi

The Combined Programme, showcasing works by emerging next-generation filmmakers selected through the festival’s open call, offers a more personal and intimate portrayal of identity, memory, and lived experience. Bamssi (2024), named after filmmaker Mourad Ben Amor’s dog, captures the daily lives of Amor and the animals he has rescued in his village. The vitality and presence of the dogs and cats became a source of healing, helping him cope with and recover from depression. Sally Lawton’s Post Partum Film (2024) explores what it means for a woman’s body and daily life to undergo the transformation of becoming a mother. Through reenactments, performances, and home movie footage, Lawton pieces together life before and after childbirth – its repetitions, separations, and wholeness. Filmmaking itself becomes a form of reenactment, a performance of motherhood. Bukeji Duxiang (Unreachable Object, 2024) also employs reenactment as a means of uncovering hidden family memories and grief surrounding the death of a female relative during the filmmaker’s childhood. To piece together this fragment of family history – especially in a cultural context where openly discussing death is taboo – filmmaker Fanfan Zhou staged a rehearsal of a family gathering in which her grandmother was shielded from the truth about her daughter’s passing. Zhou also turned to AI-generated imagery to reimagine the family’s sombre atmosphere and the expressions on each person’s face. Here, the use of AI reveals its potential to reconstruct forgotten memories, particularly when no concrete evidence remains. 

​​Hope Strickland’s Rivers Hold Perfect Memory (2025) screened as part of the Combined Programme devoted to the politics of resistance, diasporic memory, and the ethical challenges of archival practice. Strickland reveals the transformation of her film from a documentary about environmental labour protests in Jamaica to a poetic meditation on familial entanglement, displacement, and the instability of historical narration. This shift in method reflects a conscious resistance to dominant modes of knowledge production, particularly in how archives, landscapes, and histories are framed. Rather than filming labour protests in a conventional format, Strickland allows the spontaneity of lived experience to redirect the film’s centre of gravity. Strickland’s use of reservoirs in the UK as mirrored landscapes to those in Jamaica points to the idea of hydro-social infrastructures, spaces not only shaped by water, but also politics, migration, labour, and leisure. Her decision to include government-sourced LIDAR data, tools of surveillance as a counter-surveillance gesture, becomes both a symbol of state control and a method of re-mapping Black geographies. It invites viewers to question who draws maps and who gets to name places. Strickland’s film also experiments with intertitles and narration, shifting between didactic archival voice and subjective agency. The archive no longer lectures; it listens. This intersubjective relationship breaks down the binary between historical fact and personal memory, drawing attention to the power dynamics involved in determining what counts as truth. In this context, the river holds not just a perfect memory, but also the interruptions, the familial detours, and the contradictions of diasporic life. Strickland’s film resists closure, just as the river resists being stilled. This is where its power lies: in the unsteady flow of memory, co-authored by land, water, kin, and history.

Rivers Hold Perfect Memory

The Ian White Lecture Series, organised by LUX in collaboration with Open City Documentary Festival and the Ian White Estate, offers a platform for artistic and critical reflection. In 2022, artist and writer Moyra Davey delivered the third lecture; this year’s, titled The Politics of Looking: Cinema, Perception, and the Ethics of the Gaze, was given by the acclaimed writer and translator Esther Kinsky. Kinsky’s exploration centred on the transformative nature of looking, how the act of perception itself can carry ethical weight and political implications. Her assertion that “from every such encounter we emerge a different person” speaks to the profound and often destabilizing effects of truly seeing, especially when the gaze resists objectification and instead opens a space for relational, responsible witnessing. In the context of moving image practice, this means rethinking the power dynamics embedded in the camera’s eye and imagining new ways of looking that resist domination and invite transformation.

In cinema, particularly documentary film, the gaze is never passive. It is political, charged with history, desire, and power. And yet, in the flow of plot, action, and dialogue, it is easy to forget that the screen leaves us no choice: we look where the camera looks. We share its perspective, even if we are unaware of it. This theme resonates deeply with earlier visual theorists like John Berger, whose Ways of Seeing reframed the act of looking as a cultural and ideological practice. Documentary cinema especially asks us to navigate this tension. Its capacity to present reality, edited, constructed, and selective, is also its greatest ethical challenge. It can inform or manipulate. It can create awareness or reinforce bias. This is why, as the lecture suggested, the way we see matters more than what we see. It is always the gaze that takes us through any film, even if the viewer is not aware of it. In front of the screen, we have no choice. We have to look in the same direction as the camera. This is easy to forget or disregard in films that are straddled by the narrative. The more action there is, the less we see. Spectacle overrides inquiry. The screen becomes a surface rather than a space for encounter.

In contrast, the works of filmmakers like Chantal Akerman restore this ethical depth. Her camera lingers on seemingly mundane gestures, empty spaces, and unspeaking faces. In Akerman’s work, silence is not the absence of sound; it is an actor. The absence of narration, the lack of historical exposition, and the long unbroken shots all serve a precise function: they refuse closure. They create space for what cannot be said. Akerman’s journey back into landscapes marked by trauma, back into her mother’s silence about the Shoah, is not an attempt to explain the past. It’s an effort to sit with it, to see if a camera can capture what language has failed to hold. The camera, in Akerman’s hands, became a searchlight: scanning landscapes, faces, and doorways for answers that were never going to be spoken aloud. 

This notion of silence as a response to trauma was one of the lecture’s most compelling threads. In this frame, film becomes a space where history lingers and silence is given room to speak. This concept mirrors the approach taken by Lisbeth Surbien, whose Manal Issa, instead of confronting trauma through her titular protagonist, wound up removing her from the frame. What remains is a single, static frame – a fixed gaze through which we listen to Manal’s voice, her story unfolding against the distant, persistent sounds of explosions. This approach to absence connects Surbien’s to Akerman’s cinema, where silence and stillness carry the burden of unspoken histories. Instead of guiding the viewer through images, Surbien’s film demands active engagement: we are invited to imagine, to construct the scene internally, to process space and narrative through sound and absence. It is a radical kind of spectatorship, one that resists spectacle and insists on a new perception that offers a quiet yet forceful challenge to the politics of representation, reiterating the very ethics of looking that Kinsky’s lecture examined.

To this end, Open City 2025 has made an impressive effort to unite London’s creative community with academic voices, placing the idea of resistance as its core curatorial vision, not only as a response to socio-political oppression but also as a challenge to dominant infrastructures and conventions within non-fiction cinema. The festival articulates this theme across multiple dimensions: through the diverse range of topics explored in its screenings, one-on-one mentorship and consultations for students and emerging filmmakers, and interactive workshops and participatory filmmaking initiatives. Together, these elements speak to Open City’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of documentary practice and nurturing alternative modes of non-fiction cinema. 

Significantly, the festival also made an effort to decentralise Western-centric notions of resistance. This is reflected in its open-source curatorial approach, including collaborations with local activists, archivists and researchers – such as in the case of Sanrizuka – as well as its support for artist filmmakers from the Global South, who bring situated perspectives and contemporary socio-political narratives into dialogue with the London community. These engagements foster a rich, transnational exchange of ideas, deepening our understanding of resistance as a global, multifaceted practice. Interactive workshops also empowered audiences to break from the passive spectator role, dissolving conventional hierarchies between the filmmaker and the viewer. The emerging artist filmmakers showcased in the Combined Programme were standouts, with many filmmakers employing bold, inventive techniques that embodied diverse understandings of resistance. We hope to see even greater visibility and institutional support from Open City in elevating these next-generation voices.

Another notable highlight was Iranian filmmaker Niki Kohandel’s A Departure (2025), which served as the Open City 2025 trailer and was shown throughout the festival. Inviting viewers to build their own paper boats to navigate the disappearing heritage and memories shaped by neo-colonialism, A Departure brings a poignant, poetic presence to the festival, inspired by Iranian poet Sohrab Sepehri’s Beyond the Seas:

I shall build a boat
I shall cast it in the water
I shall sail away from this strange earth
Where no one awaken the heroes in the wood of love.

While the trailer gestures toward a meaningful and potent global perspective, the festival might have benefited from deeper engagement with the Iranian context of resistance, particularly in light of the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement, which has become a powerful symbol in global feminist activism. A program addressing this theme could have offered a more resonant dialogue with the trailer. In light of today’s volatile global political climate, such engagement feels not only relevant but increasingly necessary.

A Departure

Open City Documentary Festival
6 – 11 May 2025
https://opencitylondon.com/

Endnotes