Queer ways of life have become a central area of social and cultural dispute on the African continent that has frequently been instrumentalized for political means. In its ninth edition, the AFRIKAMERA – CURRENT CINEMA FROM AFRICA festival organized by toucouleur e.V. is showing a selection of current features and documentaries which grapple with LGBT themes and stand up for the acceptance of queer ways of life in Africa.

Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976) is the unknown great among the independent Indian directors of the 20th century, even though his slim oeuvre includes some of the most significant films ever made in Indian cinema. Ghatak was born into a family of civil servants in Dhaka in what would later become Bangladesh, with the harrowing experience of the partition of Bengal in 1947 following Indian independence and the huge population movements and dislocations that followed leaving a significant mark on his young adult life – a trauma he never managed to shake off and which made its way into every last nook and cranny of his art. He settled in Calcutta, where he joined the Communist Party, wrote numerous short stories and novels, translated Brecht into Bengali, and composed texts on cinema. As a member of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), which attempted to connect folk theatre traditions with a revolutionary consciousness, he wrote and directed plays and also acted in them. Political differences lead him to leave the IPTA and look to cinema for new possibilities of expression, where he also hoped for larger audiences. Excessive alcohol consumption and self-destructive tendencies repeatedly formed an obstacle to his work, with many of his films remaining incomplete.

"For us, Clemens Klopfenstein is the independent filmmaker par excellence – creative, temperamental, fanciful, humorous, open to experimentation. A auteur who refuses to compromise in any way or to follow any recipe for commercial success and who develops instead new, fresh impulses again and again from his surroundings, his experience, his contact with friends and his engagement with the medium of film; also from his reaction to landscapes, milieus, and environments. The joy of adventure and the exploration of the foreign/exotic, but also the ironic, self-critical observation of the close-by, the familiar and the well known are Klopfenstein’s basic motifs. And there’s always a level of irony in his work, of ambiguity, of playing around with nuance. Klopfenstein’s films, which are located in the border region between fiction and documentary, could easily dispense with a conventionally narrated plotline, but he actually uses the narrative as a tool, as a thread upon which he can string together pearls, episodes, spontaneous ideas or improvisations." (Ulrich Gregor)

Clemens Klopfenstein was born by Lake Biel in 1944 and has mainly lived in Italy since 1973. He has been making films since the 1960s. Since 1979, his films have been repeatedly shown at the Berlinale Forum and we are happy to be able to show a selection of his work and welcome him to Arsenal in person from 24.-27-11.

LIFE AFTER LIFE (ZHI FAN JE MAO) by Zhang Hanyi has received the Grand Prix of the International Film Festival TOKYO FILMeX.

The film, which premiered in this year's Forum programme, tells a quiet ghost story that unfolds in a scrarred landscape, where the world of the living feels akin to a strange netherworld. The jury argued: "This film explores the slow, painful death of villages in the Chinese countryside ― without sentimentality or easy nostalgia. And it does so with a startling gender twist. Each image burns itself into the memory."

Rebellious, non-conformist and cool – barely ten years after the Second World War, it was attitudes such as these that put parts of the younger generation on a collision course with a largely authoritarian society, not just in the USA and other countries around the world, but also in West Germany in the midst of the Adenauer era. While in America, the neutral term "teenager" was widely used to refer to this newly established social group, a word from the turn of the century became the much-cited German label for this youth movement and eventually also the title of a film: DIE HALBSTARKEN (Teenage Wolfpack, Georg Tressler, West Germany 1956) – for some an expletive, for others an accolade. Some of the cornerstones of this "deviant" behavior included coolness and criminality, insurgency and protest against established values, rock’n’roll and motorbikes. November’s Magical History Tour sets its sights on this area of tension and presents adolescent wild ones, rebels, rockers, troublemakers and their spiritual cousins from earlier days or other geographical contexts.

DUBINA DVA (DEPTH TWO) by Ognjen Glavonić has received the main award at Kassel DokFest, The Golden Key for the most impressive documentary by an up-and-coming filmmaker. The prize is worth 5,000 Euros.

In 1999, the Serbian Army had the bodies of murdered Kosovars transported to Serbia to be buried there in secret. Images of the route today are connected with testimonies in voiceover to create a piercing essay on the mechanics of war crimes.

As part of the "Zugang gestalten! Mehr Verantwortung für das kulturelle Erbe" (Shaping the Future! More Responsibility for Cultural Heritage) conference, Arsenal is presenting a premiere on Neovember 17: Michael Palm's CINEMA FUTURES is dedicated to the questions which go hand in hand with the "digital revolution": do film archives now find themselves at the beginning of a dark age? Is there a risk that collective audiovisual memory will be lost? Is film dying or is it merely changing? Following the screening, there will be a studio report by the ZKM and a podium discussion.

The "Zugang gestalten! Mehr Verantwortung für das kulturelle Erbe" (Shaping the Future! More Responsibility for Cultural Heritage) conference is taking place for the 6th time at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart. The digitization of cultural heritage has made huge progress. Yet in the face of the rapid development of electronic media, the project-oriented nature of cultural funding, and the fleeting character of digital communication, questions of sustainability are becoming increasingly significant.