Films from the Arab world provide one regional focus of this year's program. From Egypt to Saudi Arabia, frequently young directors examine the state of their home countries.

An architect is commissioned by Hezbollah to populate a remote district with monuments. An artist whose sculptures exploded or disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the 1980s. A magician who awakens childhood dreams and disappears animals and people, perhaps then himself. Illusion and superstition form collective imaginary worlds In his film AL MARHALA AL RABIAA (The Fourth Stage) and lecture performance "When the Ventriloquist Came and Spoke to Me", Ahmad Ghossein travels to southern Lebanon which has not been the same since the 2006 war. He crosses the country of his childhood, comprised of fantasies, myths and consumer worlds, to explore the monuments that suddenly command the landscape. Production emerges from exploration: "The Fourth Stage" is the state of hypnosis which, by leading the patient back to childhood, is supposed to help find healing approaches for psychological illness. This is what the ventriloquist whom he admired as a child explains to him.

The theme of this year's Forum Expanded is "Traversing the Phantasm". The program sees experimental and artistic film as a form of traversing real and imaginary territories that are manifested both in (geo-)political realities and the fantastical constructs that are symptomatic of capitalist consumer societies. The question also arises here as to what changes this type of traversing can and must trigger within us: what traces can be left behind by an art or film event? Following the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the concept of the phantasm is reflected in numerous ways, including in the sense of "working through" archives, social and political themes or collective fantasies. We are glad that the art critic Helmut Draxler will give a keynote lecture on the theme.

While the feature films of directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni or Pier Paolo Pasolini have become part of the canon, post-war Italian documentary cinema remains almost unknown in Germany. Cecilia Mangini was the first woman to make aesthetically demanding political documentaries in post-war Italy. She belongs to a generation of filmmakers for whom Italian cinema was not merely accompaniment to the conflicts of the post-war era but itself an actor. Before she started making her own films in 1959 and later started working with her husband Lino del Fra, Mangini wrote for film magazines such as Cinema Nuovo or Cinema '60. This program presents a larger selection of her work for the first time in Germany. Cecilia Mangini and Paolo Pisanelli, a filmmaker and the head of the Cinema del Reale festival, will be Arsenal's guests on 4th and 5th February.

"Weltreise. Forster – Humboldt – Chamisso – Ottinger" is the title of the Ulrike Ottinger exhibition that runs at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin until February 27, 2016. But traveling with the world is also one of the leitmotifs of Ottinger's cinematic work. As an "expediter to the margins of our world's perception" (Christina Tilmann), someone who crosses boundaries between genres and categories, and a cinematic cartographer of regions both near and far and spaces real and imaginary, for her most recent exhibition project, Ottinger set out on the trail of Adelbert von Chamisso in the northern Pacific. The visual worlds of this expedition form part of the Weltreise exhibition, as do travelogues, collections of notes, and artifacts from European research trips from the 18th and 19th century. To accompany the exhibition, we are presenting works by Ulrike Ottinger as well as journeys of discovery by other directors.

Flowing cascades of signs, rotating words, dancing letters, scratched, embossed, double-exposed, superimposed, animated – from the beginning of cinema printed characters have been freed from their static identity and rendered dynamic in multiple ways. Letters that succumb to movement have very different functions. They open or close films, act as a commentary or a metaphor (of storytelling), as providers of information or graphic elements, as a dramaturgical tool or as an emotionalizing factor. Writing in film opens up new areas of association asking questions about visibility and structure, perception and materialism, mise-en-scene and innovation, The Magical History Tour is making an excursion into the moving world of letters, presenting examples of how writing was examined in early avant-garde and experimental cinema, "classic" Lettrist films, and also looking at contemporary feature films with writing leitmotifs.

Their statement: A fairytale-like search for times lost that is, at the same time, an utterly contemporary, attentively awake movie experience. An essayistic, fictional, and documental film about the making of films; an intimate self-portrait and meditation on the last summer before the revolution — nostalgic, sensual, intelligent.

How does one convey the universe of a city in film? This is a question that this film answers most-convincingly: to wit, fragmentarily, with a watchful eye open to the coincidental and, at the same time, a sophisticated sense of the art of staging.

This is a film that knows its great role models – whether they are named Rossellini, Godard, Chris Marker, or perhaps even Dominik Graf – but which is also never slavishly dependent upon them. Indirectly and with overflowing stylistic cunning, the film slyly presents an entire region that has unjustly been in the shadows for far too long; a region that currently lies in the center of attention, but is nevertheless once again being obscured by clouds of ignorance and prejudice. This film is an outstanding example of how, as Godard put it, cinema is "not about making political films, but about making films politically".

On the occasion of presenting XÉNOGÉNÈSE by the Japanese artist Akihiko Morishita in the Betonhalle of silent green, Forum Expanded along with silent green and the new neighbors, Harun Farocki Institut and SAVVY Contemporary, each of them also presenting exhibitions in their new spaces, invite to a joint reception on Tuesday February 16.

XÉNOGÉNÈSE was first shown in Berlin at the 1984 International Forum of New Cinema as part of a program curated by Image Forum Tokyo. This year, a newly produced 16mm print will be presented again in the Forum as an opening film to several screenings. The print was manually scratched using a specially constructed device. A digitized version of the film, exclusively produced for the Forum Expanded program, will be presented as a single channel video installation.