“No matter where you go, the screen is always white.” Julian Ross on Takahiko Iimura’s short stay in Berlin, that shaped his artistic practice in film and video in a transitional moment of his career.

"It takes just a familiar word, a sound, to collapse space": Devika Girish explores how the temporal experience of immigration has been represented in films from the 53rd edition of the Berlinale Forum.

Although international film students at Potsdam-Babelsberg looked at East Germany differently, their work has yet to receive a great deal of attention. Fabian Tietke on the political context in which their films were made and the two rediscoveries from the 1980s showing as part of Fiktionsbescheinigung.

Simon Rothöhler on Anthropocene figures, digital imaging technologies and material aesthetic differences in the films Poznámky z Eremocénu (Notes from Eremocene) by Viera Čákanyová and SUPER NATURAL by Jorge Jácome.

The Forum special programme "Fiktionsbescheinigung" sets out to counter the white gaze on German film history. Film curators Karina Griffith, Jacqueline Nsiah and Can Sungu discuss this year’s selection of films with Cristina Nord.

On the films made by the children of the disappeared, a state prosecutor as a hero for the big screen and the significance of the Forum film EL JUICIO in the process of coming to terms with the legacy of the Argentinean dictatorship. By Luciano Monteagudo

Powerful documentaries stand alongside highly personal essay films. Features draw on pared-down plots or a penchant for the absurd in equal measure. The 28 films that make up the Forum main programme celebrate the diversity of cinematic forms and explore the predicaments of the past and present in unflinching fashion.

A total of 34 works from 20 countries are being presented at the Forum Expanded cinemas, at the silent green Betonhalle, as well as at SAVVY Contemporary and in the Marshall McLuhan Salon of the Embassy of Canada in Berlin.

Queer flamboyance in Rio de Janeiro, inverted ethnography in Bärwalde and the camera-aided dissections of Sohrab Shahid Saless: this year's Forum Special explores marginalised areas of film history. The “Fiktionsbescheinigung” series continues, while two newly restored historical films round off the programme.