On Wednesday February 10, the 11th Forum Expanded opens its doors with the group exhibition "Traversing the Phantasm" in the Akademie der Künste at Hanseatenweg, where works by Kader Attia, Andreas Bunte, Yin-Ju Chen, Liu Chuang, Raphaël Grisey, James T. Hong, Jen Liu, Lyusya Matveeva, Angela Melitopoulos (in collaboration with Maurizio Lazzarato, Angela Anderson and Aya Hanabusa), Pushpamala N., Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Sandra Schäfer and Wu Tsangare on display. Following a short introduction by Jeanine Meerapfel (Akademie der Künste) and Forum Expanded curators Stefanie Schulte Strathaus and Anselm Franke, a film and a lecture performance by Ahmed Ghossein can be seen: In AL MARHALA AL RABIAA (THE FOURTH STAGE) the director weaves a complex and unlikely union of illusion and myth between three concurrent worlds of which he is part: that of cinema, magic, and the changing landscape of southern Lebanon. The lecture performance WHEN THE VENTRILOQUIST CAME AND SPOKE TO ME looks at architects and sculptors working on symbolic and abstract monuments that celebrate the victory in the south of Lebanon, while paving the way for a new visual hegemony.

This year's video installation at the Marshall McLuhan Salon of the Canadian Embassy, REASON OVER PASSION/LA RAISON AVANT LA PASSION by Joyce Wieland will be opened on Thursday February 11 at 5:30pm.

In addition, an installation of the digital version of a Japanese short film that was shown at the Forum in 1984 will be presented at the silent green Kulturquartier: XÉNOGÉNÈSE by Morishita Akihiko shows a man steadily disappearing behind scratches that run through the entire film.

Four feature debuts from the Forum programme are up for the 50 000 Euro first feature award: AKHER AYAM EL MADINA (IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY by Tamer El Said, BARAKAH YOQABIL BARAKAH (BARAKAH MEETS BARAKAH) by Mahmoud Sabbagh, DEADWEIGHT by Axel Koenzen and ZHI FAN YE MAO (LIFE AFTER LIFE) by Zhang Hanyi.

Festival Director Dieter Kosslick and the heads of the Competition, Panorama, Forum, Generation, and Perspektive Deutsches Kino sections have nominated a total of 18 directorial debuts. The prize worth 50.000 Euro will be awarded by a jury consisting of directors Michel Franco (Mexico) and Ursula Meier (Switzerland/France) as well as actor Enrico Lo Verso (Italy).

The battle of the sexes, that eternal struggle to understand the other, reached a flamboyant highpoint in the screwball comedies of classic Hollywood cinema's golden era. Before the backdrop of the Great Depression and the conservative guidelines of the Motion Picture Production Code, better known as the Hays Code, it was these romantic comedies of rapid-fire dialogue, irrelevant humor, fast-paced rhythms and eccentric characters that superseded the more anarchic brand of comedy made by those such as the Marx Brothers or Mae West. Their own unique form of allusion and insinuation, or rather innuendo, enabled them to subvert the Production Code on the one hand, while coming across, all irreverence aside, like they were affirming the system on the other. The more socially-minded comedies among them addressed the gulf between rich and poor, criticized high society and uncontrolled financial capitalism through the prism of comedy, and showed sympathy for the policies of the New Deal, bringing their hugely different (eventual) couples with a happy disregard for class divisions. The genre, which developed out of the stage tradition of the Broadway farce at the start of the 30s and reached its zenith at the start of the 40s, rests on the ironic confrontation of numerous contradictions and mismatched partnerships, who set off strange chain reactions as they collide with the people around them. The idea is that each of them must lose their composure in order to finally find peace together, the necessary precursor to a loving marriage.

Throughout January, we continue our retrospective which celebrates the charm of this genre of gender and class oppositions by showing 20 films made between 1934 and 1949.

Language is the key to the empire. Enrique is the slave of Ferdinand Magellan, who circumnavigated the globe. Aside from bathing Magellan every evening, Enrique also has to translate Filipino languages into Portuguese and Spanish. The film opens with a cardboard box containing film rolls being dug up from the ground. Shot in 1980 and now showing their age, the images tell the story of the circumnavigation. Magellan died shortly before the journey was completed, but had authorized that Enrique, now by default the first true circumnavigator, was to become a free man. Enrique carved his memories of the journey into wood, with the sculptures adorning his garden. BALIKBAYAN #1 weaves together the official story with that of Enrique, as well as with the director’s cut of what Tahimik started filming 35 years ago in order to find out the truth and continued in a village in the province of Ifugao in 2013.

The actors are no longer the same, and Tahimik, who himself played Enrique in 1980, has grown older, just as children have been born. BALIKBAYAN #1 is a home movie, a flamboyant epic, a study of colonialism, a historical corrective and an homage to what Tahimik calls 'Indio Genius'. (Stefanie Schulte Strathaus)

The career of the producer Mag Bodard (born Marguerite Perato in Turin in 1916), who remains rather unknown in Germany, is one of the most unusual in French film history. She was a journalist in her mid-40s when she founded Parc Films at the beginning of the 1960s – at the time she was the only woman in this male-dominated profession. Showing plenty of enthusiasm, courage, trust and friendship towards her "artistic family", she produced films in which she believed but that others had considered too risky or not sufficiently lucrative. Her willingness to take risks paid off and many doors opened up when her second production THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG received the Palme d'Or. In the next "magic decade" she produced over 30 movies, including other works by Jacques Demy, as well as Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Maurice Pialat, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda. She withdrew from the cinema industry in the mid-1970s and returned to her first love, television. Her company Ciné Mag Bodard has since produced over 100 TV works.

We wish Mag Bodard a very happy 100th birthday on 3. January 2016 and are showing nine films that she produced to celebrate. Seven of them have English subtitles.

The sounds of audio tracks and an invitation to listen are at the heart of the first Magical History Tour of the year. Whether on-screen or off-screen sounds, diegetic or not, whether complex audio arrangements, an overwhelming sound or breathless silence, the audio track is an integral component of cinematic experience. It generates an atmosphere or irritates, anticipates or contradicts images, intensifies or smothers sound. It creates a world, a sonic space in which the spectator can immerse him or herself, depending on the movie theater's sound system or audio equipment. Since the mid-1970s, numerous audio-engineering innovations have facilitated the shaping of highly complex sound architectures. Alongside sound effects, multi-channel sound, surround sound, and Dolby stereo, multilayered, commanding audio tracks have been and are being created that deserve our attention and raise important questions pertaining to the relationship between image and sound.

"Weltreise. Forster – Humboldt – Chamisso – Ottinger" is the title of the Ulrike Ottinger exhibition that can be seen at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin from December 2, 2015 until February 27, 2016. But travelling with the world is equally one of the leitmotifs of Ottinger's cinematic work. As an "expediteur 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 has 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 five works by Ulrike Ottinger as well as five journeys of discovery by other directors (from Chantal Akerman to Nikolaus Geyrhalter). The series will continue in February.

From January, Arsenal's Filmatelier will present a program for children of different ages every last Sunday of the month. Artists' films, experimental works and other kinds of film will be combined with films made by filmmakers, musicians and film educators with students in and out of school. In the first edition, Stefanie Schlüter invites children aged four and above on an expedition through Arsenal's experimental film collection (31.1).