The 15th Arsenal Summer School on the topic "After the Periphery, the Center: Cinema as Urban History " will take place from August 28 to 30, 2024 at Kino Arsenal and silent green.

We are in mourning.

Ricky Shayne will be 80 years old on June 4, 2024. To mark the occasion, we are showing the film SHAYNE by Stephan Geene for a month on arsenal 3. SHAYNE premiered at the 69th Berlinale 2019 as part of Forum Expanded and was subsequently shown at many festivals.

In his latest documentary Daniel Kötter sketches the psychogeography of a geopolitically charged landscape and its inhabitants between extractivism, war and displacement. In the form of a journey in eastern Armenia, the film follows human and non-human actors as they make their way through the landscape, from Lake Sevan to the Sotk gold mine, occupied by Azerbaijan since the Karabakh War in 2020.

The Politics of Listening to the Moving Image
17-22 September 2024, at silent green, Kino Arsenal, SINEMA TRANSTOPIA, migas Listening Bar among other venues

Archival Assembly #3 turns its focus to the importance of sound and language within the archival practices of international film history.

Since 1994, Cathy Lee Crane has crafted a body of work that mines the historical archive to produce lyrical films of speculative history. She received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 in recognition for her unique re-combinations of archival and staged material.

The digital restoration of Techqua Ikachi, Land - My Life by Anka Schmid, Agnes Barmettler and James Danaqyumptewa celebrated its premiere at Berlinale Forum Special. The unique ethnographic document, a collage of film, photography and painting, tells the story of the Hopi in Arizona from their own perspective and way of thinking.

Arsenal is moving out of the Filmhaus on Potsdamer Platz by the end of 2024 and will open its new cinema in the West Hall of the silent green Kulturquartier in Berlin-Wedding in 2026. In mid-December 2024, we will say goodbye to 25 years at Potsdamer Platz and will move on into a year as a traveling cinema playing at various locations in Berlin, Germany and internationally.

On November 30, before the screening of Birgit Hein's film BABY, I WILL MAKE YOU SWEAT, the publication "Viva Birgit Hein", edited by Mike Holboom, will be presented.

We are opening our audio archive with the podcast "Arsenal 60ff". The audience discussions during the Berlinale Forum are legendary – enthusiastic and often entertaining. We are presenting a selection and contextualizing them in conversations with experts.

The head of Berlinale Forum Barbara Wurm introduces her new selection team. It is made up of a broad range of experts—filmmakers, critics, curators and academics.

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.

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

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!).

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.