Berlinale 2024: Forum, Forum Expanded and Berlinale Shorts
Film screenings and installations of the 74th Berlinale
This year, silent green is once again hosting the Forum and Forum Expanded. For the first time, the main room of the underground Betonhalle will not be used for a group exhibition, but will instead house a temporary cinema with 250 seats built especially for the Berlinale. In addition to film screenings, Forum Expanded will present two installation works and a film performance. For the first time, Berlinale Shorts will also be represented in silent green with film screenings.
Berlinale screenings in the Betonhalle
Forum
The 30 films in the main programme of the 54th Forum show how political awareness and cinematic form are connected, how diverse world knowledge can be experienced and why the most determined women are often to be found in the most remote corners of the globe.
Under the new direction of Barbara Wurm, the Forum presents its usual daring approach in terms of its offensive interest in the filigree and fragmentary. However, the programme also shows a clear opening towards sometimes larger and, at first glance, more familiar forms of cinema. Questions of everyday life, great female figures and essayistic, media-reflective works are presented. The programme includes both documentary proximity and distance from previously unknown perspectives.
Following on from this, the Forum Special will show films that take a stance - from the 1970s to the present day. The forms of resistance focus on relationships and closeness, listening and speaking out: transgenerational, activist, creative, persistent.
Further information on the programme of the Forum on the arsenal website.
Forum Expanded
In its 19th edition, Forum Expanded presents 21 film works from 21 countries. Everyday objects and materials are metaphorically repurposed to explore hidden networks. Communities and the often-convoluted ways in which they ensure their continued existence are the focus of this year's Forum Expanded programme.
The selected films, installations and performances repeatedly draw our attention to communities - their constitution, their breaking points and the dangers and constraints to which they are exposed. Lasting connections are shown that subvert social norms, families and elective affinities. Solidarity, cohesion and hope are evoked, a hidden network is made visible.
The Forum Expanded screenings will be presented in the main room of the Betonhalle. However, installative filmic forms remain part of the Forum Expanded programme and will be shown in the adjoining rooms of the Betonhalle.
In addition, Nanacatepec (sold out), a 16 mm film performance about the Nanacatepec, a rock traversed by a network of indeterminate dimensions, will also be screened in the Betonhalle in a world premiere. Its fruits appear in the form of mushrooms that create and change everything in the world. A work by Elena Pardo and Azucena Losana (Mexico / Spain 2024, 50 minutes, 16.2., 8 pm).
Further information on the programme of the Forum Expanded on the arsenal website.
Installations
The installative works include Prapat Jiwarangsan's Myanmar Anatomy (United Arab Emirates/Thailand 2023), a research project on three locations in Yangon (the Zoological Garden, the Ring Railway and the Drug Control Museum), which the artist combines with interviews with Burmese exiles. Also on show is the debut work of the Little Egypt Collective (Theresa Delsoin, Lisa Marie Malloy, J.P. Sniadecki, Ray Whitaker). On the Battlefield (USA, 2024) shows a man with a microphone roaming the fields where the Pyramid Courts once stood – a housing estate that once formed the heart of the black community in Little Egypt in southern Illinois.
Myanmar Anatomy (Prapat Jiwarangsan)
On the Battlefield (The Little Egypt Collective)
16.2.: 7–9.30 pm
17–25.2.: 12–10 pm
Free admission
Berlinale Shorts
In the scope of the Berlinale Shorts competition, 20 short films enter into dialogue with one another and reflect on the status quo of our world today. Delicate pencil drawings meet unconventionally told fictions. Personal essays encounter hyper-realistic computer animations. Absurd humour rubs shoulders with critical analysis. "Sometimes we need an example or fiction from artists in order to develop visions for our challenging reality", as section head Anna Henckel-Donnersmarck comments. How do we want to approach each other? How can we treat each other and be there for each other? How do we forgive each other?
The series Shorts Take Their Time (screenings and film talks) will be a guest at silent green.
The 20 films of Berlinale Shorts 2024
74th Berlinale: Forum, Forum Expanded and Berlinale Shorts
Friday, 16 – Sunday, 25 February
Betonhalle
Tickets available via the Berlinale website