As in previous years the Forum completes its programme with a series of Special Screenings that run the gamut between a monumental travelogue, newly unearthed film historical gems and works that grapple with both cinema and its history.

Artist Ulrike Ottinger embarked on a journey from Alaska via Chukchi to Kamchatka on the trail of Adelbert von Chamisso, James Cook and other early world explorers. Like her predecessors, she kept a log book that bears the mark of her ethnographic and artistic interests, which also appear in images: water, fish, sea otters, stones, volcanoes, the tundra, houses, villages, photographs, objects, maps. The people she meets talk about their lives and about the past and the present. Ottinger’s twelve-hour film CHAMISSOS SCHATTEN (CHAMISSO’S SHADOW) opens this year’s Forum with a mammoth screening at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele on February 12th. At the end of the festival, this unparalleled work will be repeated in three separate parts at Cinestar at Potsdamer Platz.

Under the title "Hachimiri Madness – Japanese Indies from the Punk Years", the Forum is showing a series of newly digitised and subtitled Japanese 8-mm films from 1977 to 1990 which breathe the rebellious spirit of that era. Many of the highest profile directors Japan has to offer today made their debut features in this format – very few of them have ever been shown internationally.

The 46th Berlinale Forum will show a total of 44 films in its main programme, of which 34 are world premieres and nine international premieres.

Civil wars, forced migration and the repercussions of exploitative working conditions are worldwide issues that find their way into the programme.

One regional focus this year is the Arab region. Films shot by often young directors from an area that stretches between Egypt and Saudi Arabia explore both the past and present of their homelands.

Catherine and Virginia are best friends. Last year, Virginia wasn’t doing well, while it’s Catherine who’s struggling this year. Virginia’s parents own a lakeside cabin, the perfect place for a week of mutual wound licking. Sun pours in through the windows, framing the cool green of the trees outside. But this isn’t the refuge it seems and it’s not just the music that awakens the menace in the images. The ripples across the lake and the wan sunlight offer little comfort, to say nothing of the picture of a skull lying forgotten in a cupboard.

Last year’s events keep crashing in upon the present, things weren’t good then and they aren’t better now. When the two women confide in one another, it’s like two separate monologues, the camera gliding between their strained faces as if they were one and the same. They otherwise stick to wry barbs, each criticizing the other’s privilege as they still cling on to their bond. As salad leaves wilt, men come and go, and tension gives way to hostility, what even remains of this friendship? Dark-ringed eyes alight with rage, a stream of quiet bile, one face cut into another, two true Queens of Earth. (James Lattimer)