After it says goodbye to Potsdamer Platz at the beginning of 2025, Arsenal will kick off a year without its own screens before a new cinema opens in the silent green Kulturquartier of Berlin's Wedding district in early 2026.

After many years of meaningful contribution to Forum Expanded, Ala Younis will be stepping down from her position as co-head of the Berlinale section. She will continue her work in art, curatorial, publishing, and research projects. Ulrich Ziemons remains the section’s head.

Beth B's film SALVATION! was shown at the Forum in 1987. In our podcast series "Arsenal 60ff. — Film Talks from 5 Decades", we are publishing the audience discussion with Beth B, the main actor Stephen McHattie and the passionate Berlin film audience, moderated by Ulrich Gregor.

We are in mourning.

Since 1994, Cathy Lee Crane has crafted a body of work that mines the historical archive to produce lyrical films of speculative history. She received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 in recognition for her unique re-combinations of archival and staged material.

On November 30, before the screening of Birgit Hein's film BABY, I WILL MAKE YOU SWEAT, the publication "Viva Birgit Hein", edited by Mike Holboom, will be presented.

We are opening our audio archive with the podcast "Arsenal 60ff". The audience discussions during the Berlinale Forum are legendary – enthusiastic and often entertaining. We are presenting a selection and contextualizing them in conversations with experts.

The head of Berlinale Forum Barbara Wurm introduces her new selection team. It is made up of a broad range of experts—filmmakers, critics, curators and academics.

On April 15 2023, war erupted in Sudan between two rival military factions. Two members of the Sudanese Film Group, Suliman Elnour and Ibrahim Shaddad, had to leave Sudan. They abandoned their work, their archives, their premises and all their worldly possessions and escaped with their families to Egypt in June 2023. The Arsenal wants to support them and asks for help.

The book "Accidental Archivism," produced as part of the Archival Assembly symposium, is available for download from meson press.

From now on, you can research the around 10,000 films in our collection more easily and filter them according to different categories in our newly redesigned and restructured online film database. This new database replaces our old open access database, which was in use for over 30 years and was originally programmed by Ulrich Gregor himself. The picture shows the database page for the print with which the Arsenal film collection was started back in 1963 (luckily we have a new print of the film in the meantime, it’s also available as a DCP!).

The Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art is planning to move into new premises in the silent green Kulturquartier in 2025. 

There were a number of different reasons for the naming of Kino Arsenal in 1970. One of them was the allusion to the silent film by the Ukrainian director Oleksandr Dovzhenko from 1929. We asked the author and film critic Bert Rebhandl to look at the film again from today's perspective. The result is a comprehensive research and re-examination.