Living Archive continues to receive support from the Goethe-Institut in the form of a grant program. We are looking forward to welcoming four new guest participants in July and August. We start off by receiving Jaqueline Beltrame and Gustavo Spolidoro from Brazil, who co-founded the Festival Cine Esquema Novo in Porto Alegre in 2003. The festival is aimed at following tendencies in contemporary image production and is thus to open to film screenings, installation work as well as new forms of audiovisual production, an agenda that fills a gap in the Brazilian cultural landscape. For this year's Cine Esquema Novo program in November, they will be heading into the Arsenal archive to see what they can find. On July 25, they will be providing insights into their festival work and presenting a selection of their research work together short films by Gustavo Spolidoro at Arsenal cinema.

Lara Khaldi und Yazan Khalili (Forum Expanded 2012) come to Berlin via the Goethe-Institut in Ramallah. On August 19, they present their new lecture performance as a work in progress. They are researching films in the Arsenal archive to this end which link to the futuristic scenario of "Love Letters to Mars": a 2026 Mars mission creates an irreparable rift between two lovers regarding the question of whether the Earth should be saved or new societies and colonies founded on other planets.

The exact program for both events will be announced shortly beforehand.

For many years, Nadja 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. (Forum catalogue, Birgit Kohler)

As part of this year's Summer Berlinale at the Open-Air Cinema in Friedrichshain, the Forum will present Guillaume Nicloux' L'ENLÈVEMENT DE MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ (THE KIDNAPPING OF MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ).

From July 24 to July 27, the summertime sequel of the Festival gives cineastes another chance to see audience favourites and winners from the Competition, Panorama, Forum, Perspektive Deutsches Kino and Berlinale Shorts – under the stars and before they are released to German cinemas. 

Stephan Geene's UMSONST (FOR NOTHING) which premiered as part of this year's Forum Expanded programme, can be seen in cinemas from July 10. The Berlin premiere with several team members attending will be taking place at the Open-Air Cinema Kreuzberg.

The film tells of Aziza, who is once again standing in her room – internship, Portugal, everything canceled. But her room is occupied. Her mother, Trixi, has rented it out. Zach lives there now, a twenty-something from New Zealand, who came to Germany on a one-way ticket. Starting from this situation, the film develops an almost documentary-style portrait of a Kreuzberg 'situation': everything is readily available, time, people, summer, streets. And in the end a crash, the film itself: 'for nothing'?

Clustering together in a neighborhood, sitting on the street doing nothing or very little, does this have a method? Is there something ‘meant’ by the Kreuzkölln situation of sitting-in-the-sun, using the streets like a bar, and singing on the streets - even if no one is even trying to ‘mean’ or ‘say’ anything? And yet: this use of the city, persisting on getting by without money, insisting on having time, this ‘demonstrates’ something. And what if it were just a way of reacting to the word ‘crisis’? To film the condition and to capture a story in it. People that live here, others that have joined them, stay for an undetermined time, leave, interrupt, also just to end this story altogether. (Stephan Geene)