Forum Expanded Think:Film No.3
In collaboration with Allianz Kulturstiftung, Forum Expanded presents a series of talks and panels with the title Think:Film No. 3. This year's theme, "To the Sound of the Closing Door", will be discussed in four keynote presentations as well as in the subsequent panels.
Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin
All panels, talks, and presentations in English language
Saturday 07.02.
Forum Expanded Key Notes: "To the Sound of the Closing Door"
“I thought the New Wave, at the time, was a beginning and everything was going to continue. Now I think it was the door closing.” (Jean-Luc Godard)
When a door closes, it does not necessarily mean that a possibility ends. The 10th Forum Expanded challenges this sense of finality by tracing the echo of the slammed door. The program seeks out the points at which projects and utopias are able to come into being and the way in which historical ruptures and upheavals generate visions and expectations for the future. Yet the movements and narratives created by closing, opening, and stepping through these metaphorical doors also imply the possibility of exclusion and the failure of new projects – but how does one measure success or a lack thereof anyway?
12:00 Gertrud Koch
12:45 Diedrich Diederichsen
14:00 Ekaterina Degot
14:45 Haytham El-Wardany with Lara Khaldi, Yazan Khalili
Moderated by: Anselm Franke, Bettina Steinbrügge
Sunday 08.02.
Naum Kleiman and Maxim Pavlov in conversation with Ekaterina Degot
12:00 At this year’s Forum there will be a special presentation of Tatiana Brandrup’s film Cinema: A Public Affair. The film portrays film historian Naum Kleiman, founder of the Eisenstein Centre and from 1989 – 2014 director of the Moscow Cinema Museum. Together with the former deputy director of the Cinema Museum Maxim Pavlov, he will speak about utopia and the aspirations expressed in film and art production, about the role of cultural institutions after change and upheavals, and about the current situation in Russian cultural life.
Joining them in conversation wil be Ekaterina Degot, Artistic Director of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne. Degot’s work focuses on aesthetic and socio-political issues in Russia and Eastern Europe, predominantly in the post-Soviet era. In 2013 she co-edited the book "Post-Post-Soviet? Art, Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade" (with Ilya Budraitskis and Marta Dziewanska).
Monday 09.02.
"What If? Revisiting Images 1"
12:00 Jasmina Metwaly, Philip Rizk (Mosireen) in conversation with Nanna Heidenreich and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus
Since 2011 Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk have worked on a number of militant works that engage directly with the political situation in Egypt. They first made videos as intifadat intifadat and then joined the collective Mosireen. Mosireen is a Cairo-based media collective made up of filmmakers and activists who came together during the Egyptian Revolution. Besides making videos from within and next to the uprising, Mosireen also carried out workshops on radical video-making and host an extensive archive of footage from the revolution, available at: youtube.com/mosireen.
Jasmina and Philip will re-visit some of the videos from 2011 – 2013 and talk about the temporality of images and the question of how to re/view images of urgency.
13:00 Oktay İnce (Seyri Sokak/Watching the Street Video Collective), Alper Şen (Artık İşler/Leftover Video Collective) in conversation with Angela Melitopoulos
Destroyed Sinan: Video artists/activists Oktay İnce and Alper Şen have been documenting the protests and forced migration of Kurdish and other minorities in Turkey since the 1990s. They will show video excerpts filmed between 2004 and 2014 that exemplify the entanglement of the Kurdish struggles in Turkey with the Armenian Genocide. Destroyed Sinan is a restored video document in which the violence marking the Sinanköy area has been inscribed: filmed by a villager, ripped out by a police officer, and restored and commented on by the activists. Angela Melitopoulos will talk with Oktay İnce and Alper Şen about the production of a dissident archive.
Tuesday 10.02.
"Les Choses et les Mots de Mudimbe"
12:00 Filmscreening,LES CHOSES ET LES MOTS DE MUDIMBE, Jean-Pierre Bekolo(Cameroon 2014, HD, 243 min) followed by a conversation: In his four-hour documentary, Bekolo and his protagonist and interviewee, philosopher and author Valentin-Yves Mudimbe (born in 1941 in the Democratic Republic of Congo), bring philosophy home to the common person by punctuating complex views on burning political events and rigorous philosophical issues with narratives from Mudimbe’s personal life. Followed by a conversation with Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Moderation: Marie-Hélène Gutberlet
Wednesday 11.02.
"Visionary Archive"
Since 2013 the project Visionary Archive has been linking up film research in Berlin, Bissau, Johannesburg, Cairo, and Khartoum. This research uses a wide variety of strategies to ask similar questions: What can a local archive of films contribute to practices of memory and emancipation in the face of social upheavals and processes of oppression? What kinds of (hi)stories are stored in these archives and their films? What processes of revision do we run into when watching this disparate, idiosyncratic, and fragmentary material?
As part of Forum Expanded, there will be a joint presentation of the project, using sounds and images to performatively repose these questions, all the while providing insight into the practices and methods of the ongoing subprojects: the South African B-Scheme films, made for a black audience from the 1970s to the late ’80s; the lifework of Sudanese filmmaker Gadalla Gubara, which bridges both genres and eras; Revisiting Memory, an archival research project related to periods of transition at the Cimatheque – Alternative Film Centre in Cairo; the collection of documentary films from the 1970s that are partly held in Guinea-Bissau; and the collection of films by African filmmakers at the archive of the Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, which is closely linked to the history of the Berlinale’s Forum.
12:00 Introduction
12:15 B-Schemes, Darryl Els
12:45 From Boé to Berlin, Filipa César and Flora Gomes
13:15 It all depends, Tobias Hering and Marie-Hélène Gutberlet
14:00 Studio Gad, Sara Gubara, Nadja Korinth, Stefan Pethke and Katharina von Schroeder
14:30 Revisiting Memory, Hana al Bayaty and Yasmin Desouki
15:00 Final discussion
Visionary Archive is funded by the TURN fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.
Thursday 12.02.
"What if? Revisiting Images 2"
12:00 Akram Zaatari in conversation with Christa Blümlinger
Akram Zaatari:Twenty-Eight Nights and a Poem is an interpretation of the archive of the Scheherazade photo studio. Photographer Hashem el Madani opened the studio in 1953 in the Lebanese city of Saïda after having spent years photographing people in front of their shops, in public squares, or at the beach in response to their wish to appear before the camera. Some of the poses he captured on film were adopted by those who saw the photographs and subsequently took on a life of their own. They were recorded by photo and 8mm cameras and are accompanied in the film by songs recorded on cassette tapes and played back on a laptop, together with El Madani’s stories. The archive does not actually exist in itself, but is generated by a system of recordings and transmissions in infinite variations.
13:00 Kidlat Tahimik in conversation with Tilman Baumgärtel
Kidlat Tahimik: Balikbayaan #1 tells the story of the very first round-the-world sailing tour – not by Ferdinand Magellan, who died shortly before the journey was completed, but by Enrique, his slave. The film opens with a cardboard box containing film rolls being dug up from the ground. Shot in 1980 and now showing their age, the images tell the story of the circumnavigation. Enrique carved his memories of the journey into wood, with the sculptures adorning his garden. Balikbayaan #1 weaves together the official story with that of Enrique, as well as with the director’s cut of what Tahimik started filming 35 years ago in order to find out the truth, and then continued in a village in the province of Ifugao in 2013.
"Localizing Cinema"
18:00 With: Darryl Els, Claudia Engelhardt, Andrea Kuhn, Tamer El Said, and others. Moderated by: Florian Wüst
Most films today are co-produced by many countries, and images are composed from all parts of the world, making a film’s country of origin barely relevant anymore. In addition, more and more films are available outside the cinema. But one thing remains: films show us – wherever we happen to be – places where we are not. What is the significance of local, independent cinemas in the era of globalization? Are they an alternative to contemporary fragmentation, or are they just an anachronism? What is the relation today between the ‘local’ cinema and the rest of the world?
"Think:Film Award Ceremony"
21:30 The Think:Film Award, established in cooperation with the Allianz Kulturstiftung, honors work that creatively uses its medium in order to grasp and reflect geopolitical contexts artistically, to broaden the space of aesthetic experience, and to encourage mental shifts of perspective. The award, chosen by a three-member jury, includes travel to and accommodation in Berlin and Cairo, where the selected works will be presented.
Jury: Mohamed Beshir, Ala Younis, Karim Aïnouz
