The 55th Forum main program comprises 30 films from five continents – including seven feature debuts – and encounters a world and its people that are not in good shape. “Sounding out a diverse range of cinematic forms, the Forum shows contemporary cinema that moves beyond the cult and the commercial – giving off sparks of humanity, interrogating the status quo and functioning as a seismograph of our time”, said section head Barbara Wurm.
Film titles become indicators of time here: Stefan Hayn’s 2024 (2023) places the political Berlin and the private Bavaria within the two respective frames he makes for himself as a painter of his surroundings: that of the film shot and that of the painting shown in it. Equally essayistic and image-led, albeit composed of images of the many distilled by way of AI, the fantastical visual metamorphosis crafted by Chinese artist Cao Yiwen poses a question that looks to tomorrow: WHAT’S NEXT? This philosophical dystopia is matched in eccentric creativity by the spectacular pastiche THE TRIO HALL by Taiwanese director Su Hui-Yu, in which a roller-skating Hitler dances with Stalin and Mao with Chiang Kai-shek. Dictators in league with the entertainment industry – if that doesn't ring bells around the world.
Documentary forms at the Forum
Reflecting on today by looking at the past marks a key quality of the documentary forms showing at the Forum, which make up around half of the entire program and stand in close relation to the selection of the 2025 Forum Special “Open Wounds, Open Words”. For example, the Peruvian found footage film LA MEMORIA DE LAS MARIPOSAS (The Memory of Butterflies) by Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski is a reconstruction of indigenous slavery and colonial crimes and questions the director’s own family connections. The same procedure is central to both Lee Ann Schmitt’s EVIDENCE, a meditation on dark money, family and neo-conservative ideology made in the USA and COLOSAL by Nayibe Tavares-Abel, which breaks down the political history of the Dominican Republic by examining the role of the director’s grandfather in the 1990 election fraud and her own fight for democracy – and establishes the Caribbean state as an exemplar for the current state of the world.
The different facets of the political are revealed across a broad geographical spectrum, ranging from James Benning’s LITTLE BOY, Kaori Odas UNDERGROUND and the South Korean documentary THE SENSE OF VIOLENCE, a perceptive visual and discursive analysis of film, women and enemy depiction in the context of anti-communist ideology, to the moving four-hour Berlin institutional study PALLIATIVSTATION (Palliative Care Unit), the Malaysian-Indonesian co-production QUEER AS PUNK, the miraculous journey into the underground world of regional Italian singing cultures offered by CANONE EFFIMERO, and all the way to the portrait of a relationship between a Gambian man and an Austrian woman painted in UNSERE ZEIT WIRD KOMMEN (Our Time Will Come). CHAS PIDLOTU (Time to the Target) is the title of Vitaly Mansky’s sober look at a soldiers’ graveyard in L’viv, which stands alongside the second film in the program about Ukraine in wartime, Eva Neymann’s tender portrait of Odesa. Wars create deep rifts within society, as becomes painfully evident in Brandon Kramer’s documentary HOLDING LIAT, which follows a US-Israeli family campaigning for the release of their relatives taken hostage by Hamas.
Wounded Souls
“2025 is the year of wounded souls who are ground down by dispassionate systems and unyielding regimes, look for intimacy and sense the presence of kindred spirits – whether queer, heterosexual, trans or merfolk”, states Barbara Wurm. Alongside the astounding visual power of American-Armenian debut AFTER DREAMING, SIRENS CALL by Lina Sieckmann and Miri Ian Gossing is an artistically daring hybrid-film, an intimate look at the work of real life mermaids. Further feature debuts bear witness to the burning desire for interpersonal connections: the melancholy MINIMALS IN A TITANIC WORLD by Philbert Aimé Mbabazi Sharangabo from Ruanda, the pensive BATIM (Houses), the female-buddy Melbourne mumblecore FWENDS or the music-charged debut films by Marie-Luise Lehner and Yuri Semashko that are bursting with youthful exuberance.
There is a hint of optimism at least to be found across the whole spectrum of features, even if the individual fates they narrate are hardly easy. Whether semi-autobiographical (JANINE ZIEHT AUFS LAND / Janine Moves to the Country), hybrid (PUNKU) or surreal (DER KUSS DES GRASHÜPFERS / The Kiss of the Grasshopper), whether violent Kazakh genre horror plucked from real life (CADET), downbeat existentialism from Korea (BOMBAM / Spring Night), Indian cinema of stylish assurance and concision (VAGHACHIPANI / Tiger’s Pond) or finally Eighty Plus by the ever-young former Golden Bear winner Želimir Žilnik: the 2025 Forum counters resentment head-on.
In the coming weeks, interviews with all the directors that are part of this year’s program will be published on the Arsenal website. Alongside the Caligari Prize for the best Forum film, the Prize of Tagesspiegel Readers’ Jury also returns to the Forum this year.
