Gaps and omissions, counter-narratives and revisions: many of the film works selected for the 21st Berlinale Forum Expanded focus on the ways in which individuals and states write their histories.

The 56th Forum offers opportunities to explore the cinema status quo in all its many facets and shows films by people who take their work and its impact seriously: the way it affects our coexistence, our battles, our reconciliations, our history and stories.

In its third year, the Forum Special programme focuses on closeness and neighbourhood, examining the “condition féminine” – and female directors East and West, now and back in the day.

On January 1st, 2026,  Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art will become the Arsenal Filminstitut. With this new name, the institution reinforces its future profile and is to be grasped to an even greater extent as a central location for film education, research and a multi-faceted practice that embraces curatorial, artistic and experimental forms of contemporary film culture and how these are communicated.  

How do fatally ill patients face death? And how can you help them fill their remaining time with as much quality of life as possible? In his four-hour institutional observation, Philipp Döring explores these questions by following everyday routines at the palliative care unit at the Franziskus Hospital in Berlin. The film will be available for rental starting November 17, before which it is reserved for festival screening.

Following a construction phase of more than a year, the Arsenal cinema will now open in the Westhalle of silent green in April 2026.

KADDU BEYKAT (Letter from My Village, Senegal, 1975) by Safi Faye has won the third edition of the Locarno Heritage Restoration Contest. The film is not only considered a milestone in African film history, but also a work of global historical and artistic significance.

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.