Archive & Distribution

Following its premiere at Berlinale Forum where it received the Caligari Film Prize, the CICAE as well as the Ecumenical Film Award Jacquelyn Mills' film will be released in Germany in October. Her feature debut is an immersion into the rich ecosystem of Sable Island, guided by naturalist and environmentalist Zoe Lucas who has lived over 40 years on this remote sliver of land in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean.

A film archive isn’t just a place for storing film prints, it’s a place for narratives and counter-narratives, a cultural memory. For some prints, the Arsenal archive became a veritable place of refuge, because the films were not allowed to be publicly screened in their countries of production, were banned, or put their directors in danger.

In 2021 Shengze Zhu's portrait of her hometown Wuhan won the Caligari Film Award at Berlinale Forum. In her film images of before the pandemic and images of after are joined by four letters, addressed to a partner, a grandmother, a father and a daughter, all of them no longer here.

Sara Gómez's DE CIERTA MANERA describes life in a poor neighborhood in post-revolutionary Cuba. The values and role models of those living there haven’t changed since the construction of new housing; a new society cannot be created on demand. Yolanda, an elementary school teacher, and Mario, who works in an omnibus factory, become a couple.

James Benning’s first film called THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA was a 1975 trip across the country, capturing its scenery through a car windshield. This second one also crisscrosses the nation, but without a car, carving it up instead into a series of static shots of just under two minutes, one for each state.

Thanks to the film heritage support program (FFE), financed by the Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM), the states of Germany, and the German Federal Film Borad (FFA), the Arsenal has been able to digitally restore five remarkable historical productions from its archive and make them available to a wider audience.