Austrian Film Museum, Vienna:
 In Movement – The Films of Thomas Arslan

Born in 1962, Thomas Arslan has been a key figure in contemporary German cinema for close to 30 years. As a representative of the so-called Berlin School, he has renewed German cinema with an aesthetics based on reduction and enriched it with a stylized, everyday realism. With his Berlin trilogy about German Turkish teenagers (Geschwister – Kardeşler, Dealer, Der schöne Tag), he developed a specific form of post-migrant cinema avant la lettre and has shined in genre cinema with gangster films (Im Schatten, Verbrannte Erde), a western (Gold), and a road movie (Helle Nächte). In his documentaries (Am Rand, Aus der Ferne, Am Rand Revisited), he engages with what he comes across with exceptional stylistic clarity. Arslan's films tend to focus less on external processes and more on the description of internal states. A special interest in teenagers and young adults pervades his work, which is also defined by sophisticated music choices and noticeably informed by reflections on film history. Robert Bresson, Jean Eustache, Maurice Pialat, and Jean-Pierre Melville are important references, and other influential experiences for Arslan include films by Shirley Clarke, Barbara Loden, and Orson Welles.
 
Since his studies at the German Film and Television Academy (1986–1992), Thomas Arslan has lived in Berlin. The exploration of Berlin's city spaces has left an inimitable mark on many of his films – although in Arslan's work, space is mostly narrated through people in motion, be it in Berlin or the Wild West. This can be taken literally: Arslan likes to show how characters move through their surroundings and how they travel, walking alone or side-by-side or driving in a car. His cinema itself is also in motion: Starting from the cities of Essen and Berlin, the geographic radius of his films has expanded over the years, leaving the city behind and stretching into the Brandenburg countryside and later into Turkey, Canada, and Norway. But it always returns to Berlin.

This retrospective of the films of Thomas Arslan, which is taking place from September 11^th to October 12^th at the Austrian Film Museum as part of Arsenal on Location, brings a whole lot of Berlin to Vienna – first and foremost via the films themselves, but also because Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art is paying a visit to the Austrian capital. This joint retrospective project offers the first opportunity for the Viennese to get to know Arslan’s entire oeuvre, from his early short films he made while studying – AM RAND and IM SOMMER (DIE SICHTBARE WELT) – all the way to his most recent work AM RAND REVISITED, that was made for an exhibition project at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. Arslan’s current thriller VERBRANNTE ERDE (2024), the second part of a trilogy about the gangster Trojan, will be screened as an Austrian premiere to open the retrospective. Thomas Arslan will be at the screenings on September 11^th and 12^th to speak to the audience, with Birgit Kohler moderating. (Birgit Kohler)

At the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna