Open City Documentary Festival at Regent Street Cinema

Limbo, Thursday 23 June
What are we all buiding with the Internet? Is it a new cathedral, for a new civilisation? Or the biggest cemetery in our history? As we increasingly upload our lives to the internet, Antoine Viviani’s visually breathtaking documentary essay takes us inside the ever-expanding world of digital memory, questioning what it means to give so much of ourselves to the system, so much that it now knows us better than we know ourselves.

A mysterious spirit – embodied by the voice of writer and essayist Nancy Huston – leads us through the endless anonymous data warehouses where our memories are stored. Amidst the maze of machines, the spirit encounters Google CEOs, digital librarians and the internet’s founding fathers who contemplate the history and underlying ideals of the technological revolution. The film is a poetic, essayistic contemplation of time, memory and the nature of technology.

Followed by Panel Discussion

Vincent Moon, Friday 24 June
Vincent Moon, accompanied by filmmaker Priscilla Telmon, premiere the live audio visual performance of ‘Rituals’, a musical and poetic exploration in cinema, combining nature, sacred ceremonies, ethnography, and spirituality from all over the world. A unique experiment mixing live editing and ethnographic research, the performance opens a space in between cinema, music, and spirituality, in quest of a hybrid form of image and another relationship to the audience.

There will be an intermission

Gideon Koppel, Looking & listening, Saturday 25 June
Dziga Vertov wrote in his manifesto The Council of Three (1923): ‘The main and essential thing is: the sensory exploration of the world through film.’

This shorts program curated by Gideon Koppel offers work by eight artists who each take a sensory approach to exploring the world. They do not use the camera and microphone simply as recording devices, but as ‘microscopes’ through which the otherwise unseen and unheard can be discovered. They look, listen, and respond to the everyday and unspectacular; composing stories that might be difficult to identify and describe in words. At once we are reminded of what Philip Larkin once wrote about his childhood home: that ‘nothing, like something, happens everywhere’.