A monthly star fixture: Vaginal Davis, who moved from L.A. to Berlin in 2007, has been inviting Berlin audiences to film evenings of a special nature ever since. For the anniversary celebration on October 27, she is, as every year, dedicating the program to actress Louise Brooks. We are showing the first film she shot with G.W. Pabst, PANDORA'S BOX (1929). Louise Brooks plays the seductive Lulu, who holds sway over all before her. Yet after her husband is killed on their wedding night, suspicion falls on her.

Followed by drinks and music.

Taryn has made her way from Northern Ireland to the United States – for love, which proves to be fleeting. She seeks refuge with relatives in Baltimore, but Aunt Kim and Uncle Bill are busy trying to end their marriage. It’s supposed to go smoothly and with dignity, because their daughter Abby has announced that she’ll be coming home to visit between semesters – to a home that no longer exists.

Every beginning marks an end, and vice versa. The same is true for relationships. "I used to be darker, then I got lighter…" – song lyrics that hover over the story. Director Matt Porterfield lets profound themes emerge like melodies: a stroll through the music genres and the inner life of the characters, with a gentle camera that is insistent yet not intrusive. Dramatic turning points occur almost as an afterthought and unfold all the more intensively as a result. Redemption and release, loss and change, building things up and breaking them down – everything is in a state of flux, even the water in their private swimming pool, framed just as impressively as in HAMILTON, Porterfield’s debut film. I USED TO BE DARKER is a film about being able to let go. "And then I got lighter …" (Ansgar Vogt)

Due to the great interest, public screenings will be held again starting this month, providing an opportunity to get to know the wide extent of the archive. In the coming public screenings, we will be focusing on the films from the "1st International Women’s Film Seminar of West Germany and West Berlin" in 1973. The original event was held at the Arsenal’s former location in Welserstrasse and organized by the directors Helke Sander and Claudia von Alemann, who will be present on September 10.

For the "model seminar", as it was called at the time, which was followed by similar events in other German cities, approx. 45 short and full-length films were shown, some of which are still in our collection today. The films were meant above all to serve the purposes of social education and agitation. One of the films included was YEAR OF THE WOMAN by Sandra Hochman (USA 1972, OV, 82 min), which is the first film we view. It had previously been presented at the International Forum of New Cinema and marks a milestone in feminist (film) history. It is the first feature-length film in the USA that was exclusively produced by women. It documented how, for the first time, women at the 1972 Democratic Party Convention in Miami conquered the political world that had been dominated by men. “Sandra Hochman wanted to show a new awareness of the dignity of women and she realized her intention by means of a hilariously funny film, in which a large number of prominent people appear, as do many committed members of various international women’s organizations,” was how it read in the Forum catalogue in 1973. The list of participants is long: Alongside Betty Friedan, Flo Kennedy, German Grier, or Shirley McLaine we also see Norman Mailer and Warren Beatty. Free admission.

Kim Ki-duk (*1960) is the great "Man of Sorrows" of Korean film. His 19 films so far - 17 of which we present in this retrospective with the support of Berlin's Korean Cultural Center (we hope to screen his most recent film, MOEBIUS, at the beginning of October) - are passion plays of violence about ill-treated creatures and hurt and traumatized bodies. Whereas most mainstream Korean films revel in shiny consumer worlds, Kim Ki-duk has, ever since his 1995 debut CROCODILE to last year's PIETA, remained true to himself as a chronicler of the Korean (sub)-proletariat. His films depict a Korea left by the wayside during the economic boom that is populated by under-privileged and anti-social outsiders - small-time criminals, pimps, prostitutes, madmen and disabled people. These characters function outside the socialization process and posess their own singular form of voicelessness which make them incapable of articulation and communication. The films merge poetically into the protagonists' muteness: Dialogue is reduced to a minimum, gestures and gazes are expressively charged, the body itself speaks.

Kim Ki-duk's expressionism is inspired by painting. In the early 1990s, he tried out his luck as a painter in Paris before teaching himself film. His favorite painter is Egon Schiele, whose portraits' fragile physicality find their counterpart in his films in the expressive elevation of injured bodies. Even Kim Ki-duk's early films manifest a desire to go against naturalistic stylization that later expands into the mythological realm in his international breakthrough THE ISLE (2000). Sexual animal symbolism and fabulous ghost fantasies increasingly blend into plots that begin realistically. BIN-JIP (2004) develops almost imperceptibly from a romance to a gentle tale of necromancy.