We are delighted to present CROP by Johanna Domke and Marouan Omara (Germany/Egypt 2012) at our channel at VOD platform realeyz.tv.

The film reflects upon the impact of images in the Egyptian Revolution in 2011 and puts it in relation to the image politics of Egypt´s leaders. Instead of showing footage from the revolution, the film is shot entirely in the power domain of images – Egypt's oldest and most influential state newspaper Al Ahram.

arsenal distribution is releasing STO SPITI (AT HOME) by Athanasios Karanikolas on September 4.

The film, which premiered in this year's Forum programme, tells of Nadja, who for many years has worked as a housekeeper for an upper class Greek couple and their daughter. She’s allowed to feel like part of the family. When she’s diagnosed with a serious illness, and the man of the house runs into financial difficulties due to the economic crisis, Nadja loses her job. Yet she shows no external sign of how these two traumatic events have affected her. A film of dazzling light. The misery is not apparent in the images. It’s summer, the air shimmers, the sea sparkles. Only gradually is the set-up revealed: clear distinctions exist between top and bottom, domestic and foreign, those with and those without health insurance. Yet for Nadja class is not even a question, just as she does not fight for her rights. She keeps a tight hold on her feelings, insisting not on her job but on her emotional ties. Stylised, yet with the real world in its sights, the film draws on elegant CinemaScope images and depictions of space to tell the story of a quiet heroine feeling the social chill in the style of a tender melodrama. No big close-ups, no big emotional outbursts, still great cinema. (Birgit Kohler)

Alongside such colleagues as Nagisa Oshima and Yasuzo Masumura, Ko (Yasushi) Nakahira (1926–1978) is regarded as one of the most important innovators in post-war Japanese cinema. In the West, his oeuvre is usually reduced to his 1956 debut, adolescent drama JUVENILE JUNGLE, whose unconventional compositions did not merely challenge the Japanese cinema establishment, but also became an important reference point for the French New Wave. The film inspired François Truffaut to make the following eulogy to youthful abandon: "Youth is in a hurry, it is impatient, bursting at the seams from all the tangible ideas it has. Young filmmakers must make their films at a manic tempo."

Nakahira stayed equally true to Truffaut's yearning for the remainder of his career too. In the 1950s and 60s, he shot film after film at breathtaking speed for production company Nikkatsu and later worked in Hong Kong for the Shaw Brothers amongst others. His work move through every single genre: comedies, melodramas, action films and erotic films. Arsenal is showing a selection of eight films from the first half of his career.

It's hard to explain why these films remain completely unknown outside of Japan to this day: they reveal a cinema dedicated to a freedom of form and content which simultaneously attacks the narrative and stylistic shackles of commercial cinema as well as the restrictive petty bourgeois realm of experience and sexual morals of Japan's postwar society: the young generation's desires in particular could no longer be contained, neither by the boundaries of the shot, nor by the standards expected by traditional family ideology.

The sixth Arsenal Summer School will be held from August 21–23, 2014. It will concentrate on Arsenal's important relation to its own archive, drawing from the ongoing project Visionary Archive. Under the title "REANIMATION & REENACTMENT. Forms of Cinematic Reencounter", it will focus on the specific forms of re-seeing by which the past becomes present in the cinema.

As a central component of this Summer School, participants will come together to watch films from the Arsenal archive. The selection of films focuses on the diverse forms of re-stagings, re-enactments, and the encounter with spaces where the past lives on, transparently or covertly. Particular attention will be given to films from anti-colonialist, non-European cinema and the history of resistance remembered in them. In this constellation, the view to the archive falls on films that themselves act as an archive. They assemble and conserve images, sounds, and viewpoints, they fill in some of the gaps in knowledge and open up others. They allow us to get a view to cinema that faces up to history, collectively experienced, but remembered with contradictions.

The collective visualization of these different techniques of film memory in the Summer School is not meant as an innocuous, distanced view from the outside. Rather, we will make use of the possibilities of reencountering that are inherent in each film, in which there is always something of the past involved in a possible future.