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Tutors for the Documentary Short Courses at Open City Docs School
Chloe Hadjimatheou (Making Radio)
Chloe Hadjimatheou is an award-winning BBC reporter and producer whose work includes: Intrigue: Mayday, Islamic State’s Most Wanted, Searching for Tobias, No Place to Die and America Revisited.
Catalin Brylla (Documentary Storytelling and Documentary Storytelling: Reloaded)
Lecturer in Film and Television at Bournemouth University, and holder of a doctorate in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths, University of London, his research aims for a pragmatic understanding of documentary spectatorship with regards to experience, empathy and narrative comprehension. In a larger context this work also advocates for the filmmaker’s understanding of how audio-visual and narrative representation impacts on society’s understanding of stereotyped groups, such as disabled people, women and African cultures. He is currently editing two books, “Documentary and Dis/ability” (with Helen Hughes) and “Cognitive Theory in Documentary Film Studies” (with Mette Kramer). As a practice-led researcher, he has just completed two feature documentaries about blindness and the everyday, and another feature documentary, “Zanzibar Soccer Dreams” (with Florence Ayisi), about Muslim women playing football.
Helen De Witt (Experiments in Ethnographic and Documentary Film)
Helen de Witt is an independent lecturer and curator. She teaches at Birkbeck University of London, University of the Arts London, and the National Film and Television School. She is a programmer of the BFI London Film Festival Experimenta section for international artists’ moving image. Previously Helen was Head of Cinemas at the BFI, and BFI Festivals Producer for the BFI London Film Festival and BFI Flare. Helen is also a director of The Service Co-op, an independent production company dedicated to making films about social justice, the arts and creative collaborations. She has published on independent cinema and artists’ film.
Romain Beck (Shooting Documentary: An Introduction)
With a background in fine art and theatre, Romain started out as a film editor nine years ago. He has worked mostly with documentary filmmakers and artists. His recent work includes the video installation Landlessness shown at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Disastro (Jihlava Film Festival and Whitechapel Gallery), and the feature length documentary Larryland. He also edited the festival favourite short documentary, the Watchmaker (SXSW, Hot Docs, DokLeipzig) which won awards and is on various online platforms. Alongside his work as an editor, he has directed videos for local anti-gentrification campaigns and had worked as a director and camera man for music videos for the label Nyege Nyege Tapes.
Ludovica Fales and Adelle Tulli (Cinema of the Margins and Within and Beyond Reality)
Filmmaker and artist Ludovica Fales has been making independent documentary and experimental films since 2007, following on a BA-MA in Philosophy in Rome and Berlin. After an MA in Documentary Direction at the NFTS in 2011, she travelled around the Mediterranean area, across the Balkans and in the Middle East, making films and working closely and collaboratively with vulnerable communities around the world and using filmmaking as a conflict resolution tool. Her award winning feature film “The Real Social Network”, “Letters from Palestine”, “Fear and Desire” etc…were screened in festivals around the world . With experience as an AP on projects for Al Jazeera and BBC, she worked collaboratively with various artists and filmmakers, as well as with European Cultural Foundation and Basis of Aktuelle Kunst on a film portrait about Forensic Architecture. She collaborated with Frames of Representation festival at ICA in London, and programmed for IsReal, Quadrangle, Salinadocfest festivals. With her international collective, Kitchen Sink Collective, she organised mobile cinema events in the Uk and collaborated with festivals such as Sheffield doc/fest.
Her International PhD in Audiovisual Studies led her to researching in the field of interactive documentaries, digital platforms, VR projects and wearable technologies. She started lecturing in documentary practice and theory, experimental and interactive film and video and she now teaches at UCL in London. Her dual posture as filmmaker and academic, led her to take an interest in the exploration of memory and personal and collective, including the use of archival material and new media. In the last two years, she has been engaging in a process of collaborative workshops with a group of Roma teenagers in Italy, which resulted in a series of improvisation workshops for the production of her first hybrid documentary- fiction film “Lala”.
Adele Tulli is a filmmaker and an academic researcher interested in documentary experimental practices, as well as in gender and queer studies and visual anthropology. In 2018 she has completed a practice-based PhD at Roehampton University in London, exploring subversive film aesthetics within queer and feminist contexts. She has directed award-winning films such as 365 without 377 (2011), about the struggles of the LGBT community in India, and Rebel Menopause (2014) on feminist activist Thérèse Clerc. Both films have been broadcasted internationally and have been screened at numerous festivals (Sheffield DocFest, WatchDocs, Guadalajara International FF, Flare BFI/London, Frameline/San Francisco, NewFest/NY, Mix Brasil, Turin LGBT Film Festival, Films de Femmes/Creteil, and many more) and won several awards. Her latest film, Normal, is a visual journey through the performance of gender in contemporary Italy. Since its premiere in Berlinale Panorama 2019, it screened at major international film festivals across the world (CPH/DOX Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, Frames of Representation at ICA in London, Thessalonikki International Film Festival, Sarajevo Film Festival, Against Gravity Film Festival in Poland, Bogota International Film Festival and many others) and got a theatrical release in Italy, UK, Greece and Germany. She has recently completed a post-doc at Sussex University, exploring the career of Jill Craigie, one of the first women to make documentaries in the UK.
Barbara Knorpp (Visual Anthropology and the City and Anthropology of Home)
Barbara Knorpp is an anthropologist with a special interest in film history. Her work is situated in the interdisciplinary arena between anthropology, cinema, media studies, and fine art. Before her PhD she worked in an international photo press agency, collaborated with artists, and worked in documentary and fiction film in Germany, Japan, and Australia. She was a Teaching Fellow in Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies at University College, London in 2015-16 and has been a Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University since 2007. Barbara is also a Tutor at Goldsmiths and a member of the RAI Film Festival film committee. She recently published a book on African Cinema: “African Film Cultures: Context of Creation and Circulation” edited by Winston Mano, Barbara Knorpp and Anuli Agina (2017). She has a background in Anthropology, Theatre, Film, and Television Studies, and Art History.
Katharine Round (Summer Film School)
Katharine Round makes creative documentaries for broadcast & cinema exploring the essence of being human with warmth and humour. Her work is variously described as “tender and evocative” and “poignant and viscerally enraging”. In 2016, she directed and produced the critically-acclaimed The Divide which had a successful theatrical release across the UK, followed by a US/UK release on Netflix. In 2017, she produced London Symphony, nominated for the Michael Powell Award at Edinburgh International Film Festival before a successful UK theatrical release including 3 special event performances with a live orchestra supported by Arts Council England, and a VOD release on BFI Player. She is currently working on a trilogy of films with support from EU MEDIA. She has made films for the BBC and Channel 4, exhibited at leading international film festivals (including Sheffield Doc/Fest, IDFA ,CPH: DOX & Cork Film Festival), in galleries (the Serpentine, the Barbican Centre, V&A) and at the European Parliament in Brussels. Alongside Open City, Katharine has been a guest tutor and speaker at Sheffield Doc/Fest, BAFTA, Royal Holloway and the Roundhouse, amongst others. She is the co-founder of documentary filmmakers organisation Doc Heads, supporting documentary through curated events and screenings, with a focus on independent artistic work.
Lucy Parker (Summer Film School)
Lucy Parker is a filmmaker and educator who uses conversations, archives, workshops and fictional storytelling to create films that explore connectivity between individuals and groups. She was the recipient of the IDFA First Appearance prize in 2019 for her film Solidarity which premiered at Sheffield Doc Fest and in London at Open City. Solidarity is about the experiences of workers in the UK who were systematically denied work, including women who were tricked into intimate relationships with undercover police – the film captures their coming together to find a route to justice. She is currently participating in IDFA Project Space 2021 developing a new film about the current Undercover Policing Inquiry. She was the 2016 filmmaker in residence at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival. Her films are distributed by LUX Artists’ Moving Image, London. She has extensive experience in devising creative filmmaking workshops having taught in further and higher education and in community settings. She previously co-ran the BA in Filmmaking at Kingston University and has recently led filmmaking workshops at Four Corners, Bethnal Green.
Grant Gee (Summer Film School)
Grant Gee is a filmmaker from Brighton, England. His most recent film “The Gold Machine”, with writer Iain Sinclair debuts on Mubi in September 2022 and completes a trilogy of acclaimed, internationally distributed feature-documentaries about landscape and literature which began in 2012 with “Patience (After Sebald)” and continued with “Innocence of Memories,” (based on the work of and with original narration by Nobel Laureate, Orhan Pamuk). His documentary “Joy Division,” premiered at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, and won the Grierson award 2008 for Best Cinema Documentary and the Mojo Vision Award 2009, CPH:DOX festival’s (Copenhagen) Sound and Vision award for Best Music Film (2008) and the Audience Awards for Best Film at both Gdansk and ‘In-Edit’ Barcelona (also 2008). Also in 2007, his film “The Western Lands,” a portrait of climber/writer Jim Perrin’s climb of The Old Man of Hoy, won best short film at the Banff Film Festival. In a previous life he directed many many music videos including the iconic clip for Radiohead’s “No Surprises” as well as the notoriously bad-tempered, 500,000 DVD-selling film “Meeting People is Easy” about the band. He is currently developing, with Irish Film Board and BFI support, a drama feature, “Intermission” (with Hot Property Films and writer Mark O’Halloran) about the jazz musician Bill Evans.
Katie Buchanan (Making The Move into Directing for Television)
Throughout a 25 year career in television Katie has worked to the highest editorial standards, Exec Producing one-off documentaries, documentary series and social experiments, often with complex access, compliance and duty of care requirements. Her programmes have won numerous awards including Broadcast, RTS and Grierson Awards and she has worked extensively with emerging directors including Exec Producing nine First Cuts for C4 and mentoring and promoting young female directors. As Creative Director at Sundog Pictures Katie’s commissions included the acclaimed Teachers Training to Kill and What Britain Bought for C4, Whatever Happened to Tony Slattery? on BBC2 and two BBC3 series – Big in the Valleys and a forthcoming series on surrogacy – all of which were made by female directors. As Head of Docs at Keo Films Katie was responsible for Broadcast, RTS and Grierson Best Documentary series winner, The Romanians are Coming, three series of Skint (Grierson-nominated and rated 3.3M) and real-world social experiments such as Living with the Amish. As a multiple award-winning executive producer Katie has worked at Films of Record, Minnow and Lightbox where she was responsible for developing and exec producing over 50 hours of acclaimed documentary series including Grierson shortlisted Absolutely Fashion: Inside British Vogue, RTS and Grierson nominated American Justice, War Child, Love and Drugs on the Street and Grierson shortlisted Excluded: Kicked out of School. – As a filmmaker Katie’s credits include BBC2’s George Melly’s Last Stand (Grierson shortlisted) and Extraordinary Breastfeeding (achieved ratings of 3.8M). She also worked at RDF Media for 10 years and was part of the original team that developed Faking It and Wifeswap.
Luke Moody (The Art of Industry: An Introduction to Documentary Pitching)
Luke W Moody is a creative producer and curator developing new work with LONO studio. From 2017-2019 he was Director of Film Programming at the world-leading non-fiction film festival Sheffield Doc/Fest curating the 200 film programme across short and long-form documentary film and producing live events. Previously he was Head of Film at Doc Society, co-commissioning long-form documentary cinema across six international film funds from development to completion including Oscar-winning CITIZENFOUR, and Oscar-nominated Virunga, The Square and Dirty Wars, and creative non-fiction works such as Shirkers, Black Mother, Hale County This Morning This Evening, and Bisbee 17. Additionally, he executive produced feature-length Indian documentary An Insignificant Man (Toronto International Film Festival, BFI London, IDFA) in 2016 and led on filmmaker outreach globally for Doc Society, managing UK impact distribution campaigns, innovating new means of creating social impact with documentary film. He also co-founded and curated creative documentary festival FRAMES of REPRESENTATION film festival at ICA, London and online curation platform Something Real.
Mario Hamad (Militant Cinema & Activist Film)
Activist filmmaker and genocide studies scholar engaged in a Militant and Expanded film practice. He gained his doctorate— which developed and contributed to resistance strategies in the context of state-perpetrated extermination in Syria— from University of the Arts London, where he is also a Visiting Practitioner teaching experimental and activist audio-visual production. He is a participant in the cross-institutional Committee on Activism, and the founder of Wujoud Collective— a gathering of Syrian and Levantine civil society activists involved in the creation of audio-visual interventions as political action against tyranny. His film-based work has been exhibited, installed and presented at conferences, festivals and art galleries throughout the UK, Europe and the Arab world, including Senesi Contemporanea in London’s Mayfair; the Screen Research Forum at London College of Communication; the 51 Zero festival in Kent, UK; the Cabriolet Film Festival in Beirut, Lebanon; the Arab Screen Film Festival in Benghazi, Libya; and the Sciences Po – Université de Lille as part of the Annual Conference on Political Economy.
Therese Henningsen and Juliette Joffé (Documentary as Encounter)
Therese Henningsen is an artist, filmmaker and programmer based in London. Her films have been shown at Whitechapel Gallery, Chisenhale Gallery, Whitstable Biennale, Close-Up Cinema, SMK Statens Museum for Kunst, among others. She is a member of the two film collectives Sharna Pax and Terrassen, both engaging with the social life of film. She collaborates on ongoing film and research projects with artists and filmmakers Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Juliette Joffé. She is currently working on a practice-led PhD in Media Arts at Royal Holloway University and teaches on the MA Documentary and Ethnographic Film at UCL and BA Media Arts at Royal Holloway University.
Juliette Joffé is a filmmaker based in Brussels. Her films have been shown in festivals such as Visions Du Réel Nyon , FIDMarseille, Open City Documentary Film Festival, Astra Film Festival among others. Her first film Maybe Darkness was awarded a Wildcard For Best Documentary by The Flemish Film Board allowing her to direct The Hero With A Thousand Faces which won Best Short Film Film at Mostra Internazionale Di Cinema Di Genova. She has recently finished the mid-length essay film Next year, we will leave. She runs the documentary course in Brussels- based art school Preparts. As part of her programming practice, she was invited to introduce the work of Belgian filmmaker Olivier Smolders at Open City Documentary Film Festival 2017.
Will Davies (Sound Recording for Documentary Film)
Will Davies trained in sound recording at the National Film and Television School (NFTS). As a freelance sound recordist he has worked on a large range of projects, from feature films to reality TV. In 2014 he co-founded Whalebone Films – an award winning documentary film production company. Working as part of a small production team means that he works in many disciplines within filmmaking. As well as recording sound, he has co-directed, produced and edited a number of documentaries which have had success at festivals around the world. This breadth of experience across the process of documentary filmmaking makes him well placed to teach sound recording to others who anticipate working as part of small teams, or those who want to appreciate how a documentary sound recordist can work in a way which is of greatest benefit to their director and the project.
Chloe White (Documentary Filmmaking: From Idea to Reality)
Chloe White is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and photographer and director of Whalebone Films based in Hastings and London, with frequent travels around the world to collect stories and images. Her films are intimate, considered portraits, focusing mainly on the female experience. Her clients and partners include the Guardian, Topic, Nowness, BBC, Channel 4, Oxfam, Save the Children and the BFI and she has had films screened at festivals internationally including at Camden International Film Festival, Open City, and Sheffield Doc Fest.