Image: Sable Elyse Smith, Men Who Swallow Themselves in Mirrors (video still), 2017. Courtesy the artist.
Awardee Events

Analogue in Depth Screening

April 17, 2026

Open City Documentary Festival 2026
Close-Up
97 Sclater St
London E1 6HR, United Kingdom

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Image: Sable Elyse Smith, Men Who Swallow Themselves in Mirrors (video still), 2017. Courtesy the artist.

Curated by Jennifer Lauren Martin, this screening features a selection of works by black artists and filmmakers engaging with analogue film not simply as a medium, but as a deliberate aesthetic and political strategy.


Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron)
Cauleen Smith (2008 Creative Capital Awardee) | 1992 | US | 6’ | 16mm | English spoken

Cauleen Smith employs her alter ego Kelly Gabron and a collage of images, text, and voices in order to fabricate a history in which the presence of Black women is reinserted into histories that often render them invisible

Men Who Swallow Themselves in Mirrors
Sable Elyse Smith (2016 Creative Capital Awardee) | 2017 | US | 8’ | digital | English spoken

“In this eight-minute video work, we are given nonnarrative footage sutured together to form a fragmented, hallucinatory sensation. Storefronts zoom by as captured in grainy footage out of the passenger seat of a car, two unseen men undergo tactical training that involves shooting ice with handguns, and kaleidoscopic images of cops swirl in red and blue hues. The entire work migrates between a Black conceptualist dérive and an exposé on the mundane ways that violence meets the affective realms of everyday Black life.”

Wide Open in the Shape of an Enormous Fan (work-in-progress)
Jennifer Lauren Martin | 2026 | UK | 5’ | digital | French spoken, English subtitles

“This 16mm film is a frenetic exploration of contemporary Marseille. The soundtrack, a hyperreal fiction, is paired with the languid footage of the city, creating a sensory overload that mirrors the city itself. Foley signals beyond what is visible in each frame. A handheld POV leads us through these public and private spaces. The title adapts the opening lines of Claude McKay’s 1929 novel Romance in Marseille.” (Jennifer Lauren Martin)

Cette Maison
Miryam Charles | 2022 | Canada | 75’ | digital | French, Haitian Creole spoken, English subtitles

“Cette Maison weaves documentary and reenactment into a luminous meditation on loss. Inspired by the life of Charles’ late cousin, the film reimagines her as Tessa, eternally on the threshold between life and afterlife. Moving between Montreal, Quebec, and imagined visions of Haiti, the film follows Tessa and her mother across spaces that blur memory, theatre, and dream. Through incantatory voiceover and ornate imagery, Charles conjures a ghost story that is also a reflection on mourning, inheritance, and the afterlives of colonial violence.” (Union Docs)

The screening will be introduced by Jennifer Lauren Martin.

Cauleen Smith

Remote Viewing and Other Ways of Seeing

Cauleen Smith Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination.

Cauleen Smith

Sable Elyse Smith

Mirror/Echo/Tilt

© 2015 Scott Rudd
www.scottruddevents.com
www.scottruddphotography.com
scott.rudd@gmail.com
@scottruddevents Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator whose work points to the carceral, the personal, the political, and the quotidian to speak about a violence that is largely unseen, and potentially imperceptible.  

© 2015 Scott Rudd
www.scottruddevents.com
www.scottruddphotography.com
scott.rudd@gmail.com
@scottruddevents