Cairo traffic, China's web junkies and an Iranian film-making trucker

Cairo Drive

Image by Cairo Drive

When did you last see a film about a big-mouthed hunchbacked Burkinabe “businessman” who lives off small-time scams that bring in just enough to put food on the table and fuel in his brother’s motorbike for rides with friends?

Or a documentary about driving in Cairo which shows how drivers negotiate the crazy traffic with a symphony of toots and horn blasts?

Or films about China’s web junkies who are sent to a book camp to wean them off their addiction; about the argumentative brothers who run India’s oldest auction house, or the Iranian trucker who drives his wife mad with his obsessive drive to make animated films with his pets?

That’s the trouble with the Open City Docs Fest: it’s almost too good. You scan the programme and want to see everything.

The choice is so great that on the first day of last year’s festival I spent so long browsing through my programme trying to identify my personal must-sees that I found I had missed two of them while compiling my list.

This year’s programme, says festival founder Michael Stewart, is smaller “because we can’t do justice to 100 films”, and next year’s festival – thank heavens – may have double screenings to avoid the exasperation created by a clash of two fascinating titles.

Stewart started the festival “because I thought London needed a documentary film festival”. He has certainly turned thought into reality.

There are other doc festivals in the capital, including the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty festivals, the Green Film Festival, and the struggling London International Documentary Film Festival, but Open City’s size and spread dwarfs them all.

“I am a passionate believer in documentary films,” says Stewart. “They are one of the best ways of allowing people to engage in in people’s lives. They take us straight away into other peoples shoes.”

Part of his dream-made-reality is that most screenings are followed by discussions, either with people involved in making the films, or by members of the audience sitting around and talking about them.

His excitement about docs bubbled out in a long conversation at University College London – where he lectures in social anthropology – but, as he would agree, the films themselves take priority so instead of writing up the interview I am highlighting some of the films he mentioned in this year’s festival (17-22 June).

To help audiences negotiate the offerings, the programme is divided into “strands”.  Digital Natives, for example, “chronicles the growing pains of the digital generation”. Offerings include the already mentioned Web Junkie and Visionary Letters, about a strange new practice in Ghana, sakawa, an unexpected mix of internet scam and voodoo.

Portraits – which covers extraordinary characters – includes Manakamana, filmed inside a cable car carrying Nepali villagers to a mountain temple. Each of the 11 trips is filmed with a static shot.

Three of the most interesting films in the Just Society category are Who is Dayani Crystal?, an attempt to identify a decomposing body found near the US-Mexico border and in so doing show the dangers of migration and the human cost of the US war on immigration; Ecocide – Voices From Paradise, on the impact of the worst manmade environmental disaster in US history; and Before the Revolution, which mines archive footage to throw light on Israel’s special relationship with Iran before the fall of the Shah.

Stewart gives Cairo Drive a special mention in the City Stories segment, along with Shado Man (Stewart’s verdict: “Wonderful”) , which follows a group of disabled friends who have faced neglect and scorn, poverty and hardship in the Sierra Leonean capital – “a story of resilience and strength under the most difficult conditions”. He also points to Casse, about the migrants from many countries who work on a scrapyard on the outskirts of Paris and reminisce about their homelands.

One of the five films in the Science Friction strand is about the experimental Dutch treatment of heroin withdrawal using ibaga, a rainforest shrub and psychedelic that forms a part of west African possession rituals.

There are two other special strands: Cinemadoosti: Documenting Iran, which includes the quirky Trucker and the Fox and Sepideh – Reaching For The Stars, a coming of age story about a girl who wants to be an astronaut (“Gives a sense of what it’s like living in Iran and a sense of the high civilisation represented in the country,” says Stewart); and a “Special Guest” selection of films by Israel’s Avi Mograbi.

This is the first time in the festival’s four-year history that it has put a focus on an individual, most of whose films, says Stewart, “deal one way or another with How can we all live together in this desert in the Middle East. And a lot of them deal with violence and the consequences of violence.

“But all his films are also very reflexive. They are always asking questions about ‘How am I as a film-maker representing these events in film? Do you, the viewer, trust me? Am I telling you the truth? Do the people I am filming trust me to give a proper account of them?’

“He’s asking you to make up your mind as to what’s really going on. He’s not telling you ‘This is reality’. He’s telling you ‘This is a story and here are all the tricks I am using to tell you the story.’”

Also at the Festival: shorts, masterclasses, panel discussions and  networking events.

·         Open City Docs Fest, screenings and discussions, 17-22 June. Info: http://opencitydocsfest.com/