On April 15 2023, war erupted in Sudan between two rival military factions. Two members of the Sudanese Film Group, Suliman Elnour and Ibrahim Shaddad, had to leave Sudan. They abandoned their work, their archives, their premises and all their worldly possessions and escaped with their families to Egypt in June 2023. The Arsenal wants to support them and asks for help.

Arsenal is offering a workshop in 16mm shooting, processing, archiving, print intersection and cleaning, digitization and projection in cinema from September 9th to 13th. Arsenal members and partners will accompany the participants through the entire process: from producing a 16mm film, to digitizing it, then on to projecting it in the cinema, with added insights into archiving and caring for prints.

The book "Accidental Archivism," produced as part of the Archival Assembly symposium, is available for download from meson press.

The 14th Arsenal Summer School on the topic "ARSENAL 60ff. - What Can Cinema Do?" will take place from August 23 to 25, 2023 at Kino Arsenal and silent green.

From now on, you can research the around 10,000 films in our collection more easily and filter them according to different categories in our newly redesigned and restructured online film database. This new database replaces our old open access database, which was in use for over 30 years and was originally programmed by Ulrich Gregor himself. The picture shows the database page for the print with which the Arsenal film collection was started back in 1963 (luckily we have a new print of the film in the meantime, it’s also available as a DCP!).

Big changes are coming for Berlinale Forum: Cristina Nord is leaving as the Forum head, Barbara Wurm is taking over. In our podcast we are talking to the two of them together about what is special about the Berlinale Forum and where it is heading, but also looking back on four exciting and challenging years.

As of August 1, 2023, the author and curator Barbara Wurm will be taking over as head of the Forum section, which has been part of the Berlinale since 1971 and is independently curated and run by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art. Wurm succeeds Cristina Nord, who is returning to the Goethe-Institut after four years. Anna Hoffmann will provide support as the section and program manager. Uli Ziemons and Ala Younis will continue to be responsible for Forum Expanded.

The juries of CICAE and FIPRESCI as well as the Ecumenical jury have awarded films from the Forum.

The Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art is planning to move into new premises in the silent green Kulturquartier in 2025. 

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.