Berlinale Forum 2018 lenta.pioner-cinema.ru/en/berlinale-forum-2018-2 June 8, 2018
Founded in 1971, the International Forum of New Cinema (or the Berlinale Forum) was invented as a collaboration between the Berlin Film Festival and the Friends of the German Film Archive, otherwise known as Arsenal, the Institute for Film and Video Art. Today, 48 years later, the screening room on the ground floor of the institute on Potsdamer Platz remains the festival’s official location. Erika Gregor, the co-founder of the institute, once spoke of the Forum as the ideal programme for Arsenal’s cinema. It’s true: the programme this year includes an incredible spectrum of work. There are thesis film debuts like Our House by Yui Kiyohara, a student of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s, to unfinished works like Djamilia by Aminatou Echard, a documentarist and ethnomusicologist. There is relevant contemporary film, like Aufbruch, directed and performed by Ludwig Wüst; Mónica Lairana’s La cama; and Sandro Aguilar’s Mariphasa, alongside new works by Sang-soo Hong, Corneliu Porumboiu, Sergei Loznitsa, Guy Maddin, and Ruth Beckerman. There is even experimental animation (La casa lobo) and all manner of documentary and cross-genre film. There are 45 films in total, not counting those included in the Forum Expanded programme of screenings and installations. Their regular collaboration with Arsenal both as a cinema and as an institute allows the festival to support ties with the city and with the cinema community. It’s interesting to note that Arsenal, like the British Film Institute, Picturehouse Cinemas (especially the regional theatre in Crouch End), and the Paris Cinémathèque gives Berliners the opportunity to become subscribers or co-owners, and in doing so turns into a club or even co-op of sorts. The Forum’s autonomy, just like its status as a sub-festival taking place at a separate location – unlike multiplexes such as CinemaxX, Cinestar, and Cubix, Arsenal is a modest two-room cinema seating 236 and 75 people per hall – is underlined by the fact that for its principally non-concourse programme, several independent juries and prizes are organised. Among them are the FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) Prize, the Caligari Film Prize, and the CICAE (International Confederation of Art Cinemas, of which Pioner is a member) Prize. In turn, it’s clear that its inclusion in the festival process, with its organizational and financial opportunities, allows Arsenal to show the best young cinema from around the world, according to the selection committee. However, this mutually beneficial collaboration has a downside: even in Berlin, where a decades-old community has formed around (and with the help of) Arsenal, the ten-day, 45-film programme seems endless. It would seem that the Forum’s curators share this understanding, as reflected by how they labelled the painstakingly filled out cover of the catalogue with NOT FIT.
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