On April 17, Arsenal Filmatelier shows experimental and animation films for children aged 4 and above in a program called "The cinema dances". The garish film PPII by MM Serra takes a trip to a house in Mexico where a house is decorated with red and green ribbons and also to early cinema, in which serpentine dancers swing their costumes. In Maya Deren's magical camera experiment A STUDY IN CHOREOGRAPHY FOR THE CAMERA, you can see how a dancer overcomes great distances in one single movement: He is in a forest and lands in a living room in one step. The black-and-white silent movie is followed by Len Lye's RAINBOW DANCE, a musical dance of colors which apart from unclouded joy also promises savings. At the end of the program, you'll find out how the animation filmmaker Winsor McCay won a bet made 101 years ago that would bring dinosaurs back to life. GERTIE THE DINOSAUR performs a dance and other tricks.

In this program entitled "Not so silent films" on April 24, we will watch in PREMIERE SEANCE (Lumière Brothers, F 1895) the films that two inventive photo industrialists from Lyon presented in 1895 during the first screening in history. We will watch early special effects in LES PAPILLONS JAPONAIS (Japanese Butterflies, Segundo de Chomón, F 1908), the silent comedy BEHIND THE SCREEN (Charles Chaplin, USA 1916) and jump through 100 years of film history with the silent movie with music DAS LICHT (Anna Faroqhi, Haim Peretz, pupils of Anna-Seghers-GS, G 2015). We examine questions such as: How do film images move? What do old films have to do with filmmaking today? After the screening, we will create pictures without using a camera or projector.

ZHI FAN YE MAO (LIFE AFTER LIFE) by Zhang Hanyi has won the Firebird Award of the 40th Hong Kong International Film Festival. The jury members Sylvia Chang, Denis Coté, Dai Jinhua and Ian Haydn Smith called it "a film that is bold in its cinematographic technique, uncompromising in its vision of society and employing an impressive formal aesthetic." Zhang Hanyi's debut feature had received its world premiere as part of this year's Forum programme.

LES SAUTEURS (THOSE WHO JUMP) by Moritz Siebert, Estephan Wagner and Abu Bakar Sidibé has received the International Feature Award at LICHTER Filmfest Frankfurt. The film was shown as part of a series of films addressing the subject of "borders". Jury members Max Linz, Barbara Schweizerhof and Hermann Vaske said the film shows "in freiem Experiment, mit auf allen Ebenen ungewissem Ausgang, was es bedeutet, vor den Toren der Festung Europa zu stehen. Eindrucksvoll erleben wir mit, wie schwer und gefährlich es ist, ihre mit Wärmebildkameras bewehrten Mauern zu überwinden."