Wilhelm Hein died on March 15^th at the age of 85 following a long illness. He was one of the most influential and radical experimental filmmakers of the generation that turned cinema inside out from the 1960s onwards. His life partner, photographer Annette Frick, with whom he published the image magazine “Jenseits der Trampelpfade” since 1992, announced the news yesterday.  

In addition to the Silver and Golden Bears, various independent juries award prizes at the Berlinale. Forum films received several awards this year.

The Berlinale Documentary Award 2025 goes to HOLDING LIAT by Brandon Kramer. The Forum films CANONE EFFIMERO and LA MEMORIA DE LAS MARIPOSAS (The Memory of Butterflies) received Honorary Mentions.

This year's Caligari film prize goes to FWENDS by Sophie Somerville. The jury finds the film to be “a vivid document of a tangibly pleasurable creative process, a cosmopolitan testimony to the fears and motivations of young women”.

Instead of telling the story of a shut down publishing house and its books, René Frölke's new film digs through its legacies. Each one becomes a fragment. The film drifts along these traces, in the wake of the music of its protagonist Tessa, in search of its own human history of knowledge and symbol production.

We are deeply concerned to learn of the Berlin Senate’s planned budget cuts in the cultural sector. While Arsenal does receive funding from the Federal Ministry of Culture and Media, we see ourselves indirectly affected by these austerity measures.

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.

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.