The 16th edition of the festival will take place in venues across London from 14–19 April 2026.
Open City Documentary Festival creates an open space in London to nurture and champion the art of non-fiction cinema. Based at the UCL Centre for Public Anthropology, we deliver training programmes, an annual documentary festival, the bi-annual Non-Fiction journal and events throughout the year that aim to challenge and expand the idea of documentary in all its forms.
20/04/2026
The 2026 festival has now come to a close ❤️🔥
We would like to thank every single audience member, filmmaker, panelist, speaker, volunteer, projectionist, partner, sponsor and our amazing team.
Until next year!
19/04/2026
Day 5 @ Open City Documentary Festival 💗🌅
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18/04/2026
Day 4 @ Open City Documentary Festival 🌟🪩
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17/04/2026
Day 3 @ Open City Documentary Festival 2026 🌸
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Every year Open City Documentary Festival commissions a filmmaker previously screened at the festival to create the trailer for the following edition.
Our 2026 Festival trailer marks the 50th anniversary of John Smith’s classic film The Girl Chewing Gum.
We spoke with John about the film and reflections 5 decades on.
You can read the full interview via the link in bio 🔗
16/04/2026
Day 2 @ Open City Documentary Festival 🎞️
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16/04/2026
Day 2 @ Open City Documentary Festival 2026 🎞️
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The Case Against Space (Graeme Arnfield, 2026)
Graeme Arnfield’s second feature The Case Against Space depicts, what appears to be, the first organised strike beyond Earth’s orbit. The film reconstructs the events of the 1973 Skylab 4 mission: in protest against the pressures and working conditions aboard their space station, commander, pilot and science pilot ceased work and cut communications with mission control.
Drawing on transcripts of exchanges between the crew and NASA, Arnfield combines extensive research with speculative interpretation, imagining the tensions and human dynamics that led to this unprecedented event. He employs a distinctly lo-fi aesthetic, recreating the Skylab space station in a studio. The astronauts’ testimonies are performed by actors and filmed in claustrophobic close-ups using 1970s CCTV black-and-white cameras.
The intersection between technology and ecology is a recurring theme in Arnfield’s work. This new project extends these ideas and upon his earlier found footage works to craft a compelling reconstruction of a unique moment in the history of space exploration.
The film closes the festival Sunday 19 April at the , 7pm 🚀
16/04/2026
Closing Night: SLET 1988 + The Case Against Space
We are delighted to be closing the festival with new works from Marta Popivoda and Graeme Arnfield.
The Case Against Space reconstructs the 1973 Skylab strike, using lo-fi CCTV aesthetics to explore labour disputes beyond Earth.
In SLET 1988, dancer Sonja Vukićević performs in an empty Belgrade gym, her aging body serving as an archive of Yugoslavia’s splintered history and lost ideologies.
Followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers.
The films screen Sunday 19 April at , 7pm 🌟
15/04/2026
Opening Night @ Open City Documentary Festival 2026 🌟🚨🚀
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The Seasons (As Estações)
Three images succeeding the other in the beginning of The Seasons anticipate its polyphonic approach to portraiture: a yellow van on winding roads buoyant to a song by Lucho Gavilanes, dry earth tilled by a hand-operated farming tool, and an excavation.
“I don’t differentiate between documentary and fiction; I make a film. For me, shooting a landscape is the same as shooting with actors.” - Maureen Fazendeiro
The film screens Friday 17 April at the , 6.15pm
14/04/2026
The fourth iteration of Open City Texts is now online!
Open City Texts is a publishing offshoot of Open City Documentary Festival. It was created in 2023 as a platform to collect the texts we commission each year to accompany the screenings of new films in the festival programme.
We conceive of the festival almost as an alternative “film school”, a space where we come together to watch, share, and discuss non-fiction cinema in all its forms. As part of that purpose, Open City Texts hopes to provide a space for new writing on non-fiction film.
Printed copies of each text will also be available for audience members to collect at the relevant screenings.
All the texts are available to read online at opencitytexts.com (link in bio).
Thank you to our contributors:
Thirza Wakefield
Becca Voelcker
Shamica Ruddock