Our next "Filmmakers' Choice" will be presented by Carola Spadoni on June 15.

In 1968, to come to terms with reality meant to overcome the patriarchal structures of academic knowledge and to enrich it with personal as well as collective experience. A continuum of love, rebellion and radical decisions spread around the streets of Rome; and life and art became inseparable. The area around Piazza Navona and Trastevere - in which workers still lived at the time - became the home, stage and school of experimenting youths. At the same time, film was declared a political act instead of an artistic endeavor. Political speeches, the dialectic of "stream of consciousness", performative, "mise en scène", intimacy, background noises and the self-perception of the cinema moved into the forefront. We will screen rarely seen Italian films, fragments of a discourse about Rome in '68 and its unique echo.

In June and July, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, presents a selection of films from the first ten years of Forum Expanded. The Forum Expanded co-curators Nanna Heidenreich and Uli Ziemons will be in attendance to present ten programs to the Korean audience.

Films from the very first edition - like Harun Farocki's ZUR BAUWEISE DES FILMS BEI GRIFFITH - will be shown alongside those from the most recent edition, e.g. LA DOLCE SIRIA by Ammar Al-Beik. Further works included are by Maite Abella, Gheith Al-Amine, Basma Alsharif, Maria Theresa Alvarez, Bruce LaBruce, Octavio Cortázar, Keren Cytter, Roy Dib, Ayşe Erkmen, Jeanne Faust und Jörn Zehe, 
Ken Jacobs, Sharon Lockhart, Armando Lulaj, Mpumelelo Mcata, Isabelle Prim, Nicolas Rey, Paul Rowley, Tim Blue and David Philips, Constanze Ruhm and Christine Lang, Isabell Spengler as well as Florian Zeyfang. Many films will have their Korean premiere.

Few films have shown early 1960's Moscow, its young inhabitants, its streets, squares, houses, and apartments in such lively, immediate fashion and created a such clear-sighted portrait of a whole generation's attitude towards life as Marlen Khutsiev's MNE DVADTSAT LET (I Am Twenty, 1961-64). Born in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1925 and trained at the State Film Academy (WGIK) in Moscow, this director, screenwriter, actor, professor, and outstanding protagonist of the 1950s and 60s Soviet New Wave produced the central work of Soviet Thaw-Era cinema with this film, despite the fact it had to be cut and reworked following an intervention by Khrushchev. His early films, such as DVA FYODORA (1958), already marked a new cinema characterized by a Neorealist-indebted spirit of critical optimism that reached its zenith with I AM TWENTY. Following Iyulskiy dozhd (July Rain, 1967), a sort of continuation of I AM TWENTY, and the anti-war film BYL MESYATS MAY (It Was in May, 1970), Khutsiev increasingly began working as a theater director and professor at the WGIK. In 1983, he shot his first color film Poslesloviye, for which he left his standard cinematic terrain of the city and its streets behind and concentrated entirely on interiors and intergenerational dialogue. His most recent feature-length film, the philosophical reflection INFINITAS, was shown at the Berlinale Competition in 1992. Khutsiev is active to this day as a director and lecturer and has not only created an important body of work, but has also left his mark on numerous Russian filmmakers. With the support of and in collaboration with the GoEast Festival in Wiesbaden and film scholar and curator Barbara Wurm, who will be introducing the opening evening, we are very happy to be able to present this great directors' seldom shown films in his actual presence.