To round off the year, Vaginal Davis is presenting TOCA PARA MI (Argentina 2001) by Rodrigo Fürth on December 16. Carlos is the drummer in a punk rock band in Buenos Aires. When his adoptive father Genaro, an accordion player, dies, he travels to the small village of Los Angeles, which is in the middle of nowhere. The further he leaves punk music behind him, the more open he becomes to the rhythms of folklore, such as the Cumbia or Cuartelazo. It is more than ten years ago that a train last passed through Los Angeles. For this reason, many of the village inhabitants have either done a runner or are prostituting themselves, like the young Fabiana... Followed by drinks, music and gossip with Vaginal Davis.

At the request of Constanze Ruhm the film ANNA (Italy 1975, 16mm, 213', OV/GeS) by Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli will be shown and discussed on December 18. ANNA is an documentary about a 16-year-old homeless junkie, eight months pregnant, whom the filmmakers discovered in Rome’s Piazza Navona. It documents the interactions between the beautiful, clearly damaged, often dazed teenager and the directors, who take her in partly out of compassion and partly because she’s a fascinating subject for a film. ANNA cuts between long domestic scenes (including an interminable delousing in the shower) and equally protracted café discussions back in the square, where the unruly cross talk touches on the movie’s key themes: between filmmakers, the state and the society. Far from straightforward vérité, this self-implicating chronicle includes reenactments of the first meeting, explicit attempts to direct its subject, and frequent intrusions from behind the camera (not least the emergence of the film’s electrician as a love interest).  The film was originally recorded with a video apparatus in a length of 11 hours and a 4 hours abridged version was transferred to 16mm film in June 1975 by using the "Vidigrafo" (constructed by Grifi himself). That same year, ANNA was shown at the International Forum of New Cinema.

Manuel von Stürler's HIVER NOMADE (WINTER NOMADS) has won the European Documentary Award. The film had received its world premiere in this year's Forum program. The other nominees were "London: The Modern Babylon" by Julien Temple and "Le Thé ou l' Electricité" by Jérôme Le Maire. The European Film awards are voted for by the 2700 members of the European Film Academy.

Since last February, a selection of films from the arsenal distribution range has been available at ARTE Creative, an interactive platform that also encompasses experimental film and video work. Newest addition is .TRACING (.SPURNAHME) by Juliane Henrich. .TRACING is a film about „imagined memory“ related to a place – an area in the center of Berlin that used to be a prussian drillground in the 19th century before, in 1951, the socialist GDR-government built the „Stadium of the World’s Youth“ on it – a site for sport-events and political manifestations adjacent to the border with West-Berlin. Currently the German Intelligence Service is errecting its new headquarters on the same ground. A female narrator talks to an absent counterpart and intertwines different layers of time and perspectives of remembering.

On December 21, Maike Mia Höhne will be presenting films by Maya Deren, Carolee Schneemann, Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken and Rüdiger Neumann. "The repetition is in difficulty, again and again. Why again and again? Because it has to happen again and again to trigger a sound. To create an echo. It's about transcendence these days, again and again. RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME (Maya Deren, 1946). Condensing the internalized into the outside. To the bodies in motion. No disappearing into pornography, devotion: FUSES (Carolee Schneemann, 1965–68). Stan Brakhage picks up on the light in EYE MYTH EDUCATIONAL (1972) and Marie Menken follows Christmas lights in LIGHTS (1965), transferring them from real life into the cinematic realm. STEIN / LICHT (Rüdiger Neumann, 1993) is a journey though time and tide. It is only in the darkest black of night, as visceral as celluloid, that the sound of the lights that appear on the horizon is produced." (Maike Mia Höhne)