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Open City Documentary Festival Combined Programme: Available Light + Discussion

Open City Documentary Festival 2025

open city combined prog

This programme brings together four new works by UK-based artists Chiemi Shimada, Luke Fowler, Morgan Quaintance and Corin Sworn who will all be present for a post-screening discussion.

Fowler’s Being Blue is the latest of his biographical films, documenting Derek Jarman’s domestic and artistic haven, Prospect Cottage. On Weaving is collaborative film by artists Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn that reflects on the legacy of textile designer Bernat Klein (1922-2014). Quaintance’s Available Light wanders through urban Japan presenting a transient series of vignettes on the precarity and confines of shelter as seen by an outsider. In Shimada’s Oneiric Kitchen, picturesque activities gather those afflicted by atypical sleep patterns.

£10.40

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Programme

Being Blue
UK 2024 dir. Luke Fowler 18 min

Being Blue is the latest of Fowler’s biographical films, documenting Derek Jarman’s domestic and artistic haven, Prospect Cottage. Fowler’s lens, shooting on his signature 16mm, gazes across the house, its contents, the garden which Jarman painstakingly tended to in the final years of his life and the surrounding Kentish coast with a vibrancy reflecting Jarman’s research of colour. A previously unheard interview with Jarman and Tilda Swinton, discovered by Fowler whilst filming, forms part of a rich soundscape that also includes music from Jarman’s collaborators. 


On Weaving
UK 2025 dir. Luke Fowler & Corin Sworn 26 min

On Weaving is collaborative film by artists Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn that reflects on the legacy of textile designer Bernat Klein (1922-2014). Born in Serbia, Klein emigrated to the UK in the post-war period and based his textile manufacturing business in the Scottish Borders. Developed as part of a residency at Alchemy Film & Arts, the film weaves together two portraits: of the region’s famous textile industry and of High Sunderland, the modernist house that Peter Womersley designed for Klein near Selkirk – a house “stitched” into the Scottish landscape that inspired Klein’s textile designs.

Available Light
UK 2025 dir. Morgan Quaintance 31 min

Available Light wanders through urban Japan presenting a transient series of vignettes on the precarity and confines of shelter as seen by an outsider. Geometric and playful in form, Quaintance’s camera flits from flat viewings to preserved period gardens accompanied by dialogues that range from intimate to transactional. Between surveying and desiring domesticity, Available Light offers a restless meditation on the contemporary state and unease of dwelling.


Oneiric Kitchen
UK/Japan 2024 dir. Chiemi Shimada 11 min

Picturesque activities gather those with a sinister secret: they are all afflicted by atypical sleep patterns. In participatory workshops held across the UK and Japan, patients and doctors partake in tactile, ludic gatherings, while opening up about the vulnerability and mercurial nature of dreams and (lack of) slumber. Both a remedial, practice-based project and a film, Oneiric Kitchen ushers a private nocturnal problem into a communal forum of open discussion and soothing reflection. 

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