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Cine-Argo, Tehran: Forum & Friends V (Expanded) – Echoing Voices

Film still from Felipe M. Bragança’s film “Zizi (ou oração da jaca fabulosa)”. In the courtyard of a house with abundant vegetation, an intergenerational group gazes at the sky. The protagonist sits at the center of the group while a golden, ethereal light rises from the ground, bathing the scene in a supernatural aura.
Felipe M. Bragança, ZIZI (OU ORAÇÃO DA JACA FABULOSA) (Still) © DUAS MARIOLA FILMES

In September 2025, Forum and Forum Expanded will present a curated selection of films from their Berlinale lineups at Cine-Argo in Tehran. “Echoing Voices” presents three feature-length films from Forum and three short films from Forum Expanded, marked by formal openness, aesthetic sensitivity, and poetic depth.
The Forum films all premiered at the 2025 Berlinale edition and are thus recent examples of the vibrant intersection of personal experience, actualities rooted in complex histories, and current auteur cinema.

Weaving memory, dreams, and collective consciousness into a reflection on resistance, AFTER DREAMING is a contemporary visual exploration of, and fictional journey into, war-torn Armenia, the hypnotic debut by Christine Haroutounian. (13.0., Introduction: Barbara Wurm)
EVIDENCE by Lee Anne Schmitt, a densely knit, thought-provoking 16mm film essay exploring personal memory and environmental legacy through archival footage and poetic imagery, reflects family values, ecology, and economy in the state of America today. (21.9., Outroduction: Anna Hoffmann)
A Belarusian micro-budget indie film made in Warsaw and the winner of the Tagesspiegel audience award at Berlinale – THE SWAN SONG OF FEDOR OZEROV – marks Yuri Semashko’s feature-length debut: playfully combining poetry, Orpheus & Eurydice, orcs & elves, animation, and music, this film is an elegiac meditation on farewell and transformation – and the passion for tunes.

Broadening the programme’s artistic and conceptual scope, Forum Expanded showcases a selection of boundary-defying works that explore the intersections of cinema, performance, and visual art, grouped around themes of embodiment and physicality:
EXTRA LIFE (AND DECAY) (Stephanie Lagarde) engages with corporeality and technological entropy through an immersive experimental language that probes the fragility and resilience of the human and animal body.
The body set in motion in VS (Lydia Nsiah) is an abstract one, made of data. Accelerated, dissolved, and reshaped images of server farms form the basis of this mesmerizing cinematic vortex.
ZIZI (OR PRAYING TO A FABULOUS TREE) (Felipe M. Bragança) unfolds as a poetic invocation, weaving mythology and utopian thought into a cinematic act of devotion and transformation in search of personal memory and legacy. (20.9.)

The films of the “Echoing Voices” selection challenge conventional narratives and invite viewers into contemplative spaces where form and meaning intertwine, expanding the very notion of cinematic experience.

At Cine-Argo, Argo Museum of Contemporary Art and Cultural Centre

→ The Forum & Friends program.

Funded by:

  • Logo Minister of State for Culture and the Media

Arsenal on Location is funded by the Capital Cultural Fund

The international programs of Arsenal on Location are a cooperation with the Goethe-Institut