On 17.5., the last day of the special "Bigger Than Life. Ken Adam’s Film Design" exhibition at the Museum für Film und Fernsehen (free entry the entire day!), we are showing Kubrick’s angry satire about the dangers of atomic war and the Cold War era fears DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA 1964). US general Jack D. Ripper sees the world under threat from a Communist conspiracy and sets a fleet of B52 bombers in motion in the direction of the Soviet Union. The grotesque setting is emphasized by Ken Adams’ visionary film architecture. The bombproof briefing room beneath the Pentagon, the iconic war room, is brought to life with high-tech decor. Adams’ depiction of space via geometric forms finds its most famous expression in this center of power.

An event by the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen.

On May 7 arsenal distribution is releasing PĂDUREA E CA MUNTELE, VEZI? (THE FOREST IS LIKE THE MOUNTAINS) by Christiane Schmidt and Didier Guillain.

The film which premiered in last year's Forum programme and was screened and awarded at many international film festivals since, portrays a Roma village in the Carpathian Mountains, where the inhabitants live off the land, making use of all the riches it has to offer. A sensitive observation of life on the economic sidelines, where a strong sense of community is what keeps things together.

After its premiere at this year's Forum HEDI SCHNEIDER STECKT FEST (HEDI SCHNEIDER IS STUCK by Sonja Heiss is being released in cinemas from May 7.

The film tells of a model family's happy life unexpectedly going off the rails when the carefree Hedi, played by Laura Tonke, suddenly starts having panic attacks. First mental illness and then drug dependency – the happiness that these happy-go-lucky thirty-somethings once took for granted suddenly seems unattainable, and their world fragile and uncertain.

Sonja Heiss takes quite a risk with her second feature film, tackling a serious subject with an unerring grasp of comedy. But the director masters the balancing act between tragedy and comedy with bravura. It’s not just Laura Tonke’s performance that is splendidly on the brink, such as when Hedi gets stuck in a lift at the beginning of the film and begins a nonsensical conversation with the man who responds to her emergency call. Throughout the film’s 90-minute running time, the dramatic structure and editing equally allow for the most absurd ruptures and mood changes, which still always end up leading somewhere. The film repeatedly challenges the audience to revise their hasty judgements, reallocate their sympathies and reassess the plot and actors. (Christoph Terhechte)

The French camerawoman Sophie Maintigneux, who has lived in Berlin since 1988, is one of the most renowned and productive in Europe. During the course of her career, she has marked about 70 films with her composition and visual style, winning many awards. She has worked with Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Klier, Rudolf Thome, Marcel Gisler, Jan Schütte, Philipp Gröning, Helga Reidemeister and many others, but often chooses projects by less well-known filmmakers. For many years, she taught at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin and other film schools and since 2011 she has been Professor for Artistic Cinematography at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne.

She has been behind the camera on both fiction films and documentaries and her extensive body of work is very diverse. It attests to a penchant for artistic and thematic challenges and is based on a combination of creative curiosity and longstanding experience. Her camera work, lighting, framing and composition vary from one film to the next, but the way that she brings faces and bodies into the picture is always characterized by the remarkable sense she always has for a particular concrete situation. The quality of her creation, her interest in reflecting upon her own work and cinema generally, her commitment to the equal treatment of women in the film industry and her active support of young filmmakers distinguish her as an artist who thinks within a greater context and enriches the contemporary film business in every way.

Arsenal is showcasing Sophie Maintigneux's camera work with four feature films and five documentaries made between 1986 and 2013. We are very pleased to announce that she will be our guest for the opening weekend.

From 8th to 15th April 2015, ALFILM – Arab Film Festival Berlin, is presenting feature films, documentaries, shorts and video art for the sixth time. Thanks to its focus on artistically-demanding indie and genre films, the festival has become one of the most important of its kind in Europe.

A particular highlight of this year's ALFILM is a retrospective dedicated to the Egyptian actress Yousra, who will attend the opening screening of MARCIDIS on 9th April. Yousra rose to fame among a broader audience through her work with the popular comic Adel Imam and then expanded her wide range of roles in cooperation with the iconic directors Youssef Chahine and Yousry Nasrallah. She has been one of the most outstanding figures of Arab cinema since the 1980s. ALFILM is organized by the Zentrum für arabische Filmkunst und Kultur e.V. Please visit www.alfilm.de for further details.

Cinemascope – rarely has another cinematic term aroused more expectations in the cinemagoer. As the curtain opens slowly at the beginning of a showing, it reveals an ever-growing screen that the walls of the cinema seem hardly able to contain. Expanding images, spectacular expanses, breathtaking proximity, visual wealth – bigger than life or just unnecessarily oversized? Billy Wilder found sober words for this technological innovation that Twentieth Century Fox unveiled with the epic costume drama The Robe in 1953: "An ideal format for filming the life of a dachshund!" Fritz Lang's remark in Godard's Scope film "Le Mépris" is also unforgettable: "Cinemascope is fine for snakes and coffins, but not for people." The films of our Cinemascope retrospective hail from five decades and there is not one dachshund to be seen and only a few snakes and coffins. They impart a sense of the immense scope (!) there is for different artistic approaches to the over-sized 2:35:1 aspect ratio and its impact on the use of space and narrative strategies.

One cannot imagine film without landscapes. The scenery is as variegated as the potential and functions of these topographies are comprehensive and diverse: Landscapes in films tell stories, express moods, can play the lead, become psychic landscapes or places of longing. They are symbolic foils, islands of stasis within the frequently breakneck flow of the plot. Landscapes are "the freest element of film, the least burdened with servile, narrative tasks, and the most flexible in conveying moods, emotional states, and spiritual experiences" (Sergei Eisenstein). Since the beginning of cinematography, film has made prolific use of this mutable vehicle for conveying ideas: Early screen images of both exotic foreign locations and the native countryside quickly merged into genre films with an intensive use of landscapes. And yet even outside of this genre, a broad panorama of landscapes has opened up in the areas of documentary, fiction, and experimental filmmaking which we shall examine in a series of 13 films in April.

FilmPolska, the largest festival of Polish cinema in Germany, is celebrating its 10th birthday. Among the many guests of this anniversary edition will be the two cameramen Krzysztof Ptak and Arkadiusz Tomiak, whom we welcome to Arsenal as part of the festival's traditional focus on the camera.