Powerful documentaries stand alongside highly personal essay films, while works of fiction draw on pared-down plots or surrealist exuberance in equal measure. Whether narrow analogue formats or digital scans, 80s video footage or hand-coloured images from cinema’s early years: the 28 films that make up the 53rd Berlinale Forum main programme celebrate the diversity of cinematic forms, approaches and narratives, and explore the predicaments of the past and the present in unflinching fashion.
Complementing the main programme, this year’s Forum Special explores marginalised areas of film history: queer flamboyance in Rio de Janeiro, inverted ethnography in Bärwalde and the camera-aided dissections of Sohrab Shahid Saless. The "Fiktionsbescheinigung" series shows ten short, medium-length and feature-length films by Black directors and directors of color who live or have lived in Germany. They are complemented by two newly restored films dedicated to Black culture in the US and Brazil.
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