This is What Cinema Can Do – Bidding Farewell to Potsdamer Platz

An era is coming to an end: in mid-December, the Arsenal cinema at Potsdamer Platz is closing in order to move to its new location at silent green in Wedding and set up home there before the new auditorium opens at the start of 2026.
Since June 1st, 2000, we have been doing everything we possibly can to keep reinventing cinema and find the greatest range of possible answers to the question “what can cinema do?” every single evening; we will keep on doing so until December 15th, 2024. There have been numerous occasions to take a self-reflexive look at our cinema practice over the years: Potsdamer Platz itself, which was a challenging location from the start; the omnipresence of moving images outside of the cinema auditorium wrought by digitization; the pandemic, which led to a shift in leisure habits and an explosion in home streaming; the notorious lack of resources and the need to preserve spaces for open culture and maintain dialogue in the face of multiple political crises.
Despite the constantly changing framework conditions for running a cinema, we have been able to count on interested and pleasingly heterogenous audiences over the years, who have accompanied and supported us, discussed, applauded, been made to think, laughed and sometimes cried in the auditorium – this was the only way in which Arsenal was able to function as a place of lively exchange which has also filtered out to society outside. And this was the only way in which cinema could become a space in which it was possible to see and conceive of the world differently simply by moving through different films. We would like to express our enormous gratitude for this.

From December 1st to 15th, we are thus bidding farewell to our audiences and to Potsdamer Platz with a program that is bursting at the seams: 40 events in two weeks!

Instead of carrying out a linear historiography to recap our time there, we are offering a kaleidoscope of different themes that relate to the power and possibilities of cinema and to show a small section of what cinema can do: Association/Alienation/Transformation, Autobiography, Cairo, Camp, Champagne, Cinema Hopping, Dialogue, Distribution, Dostoevsky, Fairy Tales, Farewells, Feminism, the Future, Genre, Gossip, History, In-between Spaces, Laughter, Living Archive, Literature, Magic, Musicals, Nature, Opulence, Overtaking at Speed, Performance, Performing Documentary, Premieres, Pop & Politics, Potsdamer Platz, the Present, Projection, 70 mm, Sony Center, Rising Stars, Falling Stars, Starring Roles, Still Lives, University, Virtuosity, World Travel, Winterfest. Cinema can do all these things – and much, much more.

Running a cinema is a community endeavor and this program is the result of even more teamwork than ever, involving much individual expertise and many personal passions while also representing Arsenal’s different spheres of activity (including Archive, Distribution, Festival and Campus). There are events that relate to programs that have taken place over the last 25 years, with revivals thus standing alongside Berlin premieres of films currently on the international festival circuit and special requests rubbing against some of our finest hours or other highlights from the history of Arsenal at Potsdamer Platz – which itself forms the focus of several events in turn. We’ve created a program whose diversity tells the story of what makes Arsenal so special. The typical Arsenal blend also includes numerous guests as always (Heinz Emigholz, Andreas Reihse, Dirk von Lowtzow, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Florian Wüst, Marta Mateus, Michael Baute, Josie Rücker, Jan Bachmann, Niklas ­Buescher, Eunice Martins, Anja Dornieden, Melissa Dullius, Juan David González Monroy, Luisa Greenfield, Anja Lückenkemper, Bernd Lützeler, Bert Rebhandl, Avi Mograbi, Christoph Terhechte, Ramon and Silvan Zürcher, Esther Buss, Vaginal Davis, Daniel Hendrickson, The CHEAP Artists’ Group) and of course Q&As and introductions – as well as drinks at the revived Gossip Bar.

Celebrate this farewell with us and join us in raising our glasses to the past 25 years and the ones to come, we’re looking forward to seeing you!