arsenal distribution will be releasing another film from this year's Forum program: TEPENIN ARDI (BEYOND THE HILL) by Emin Alper. Following the release on November 15, the winner of this year’s Caligari Film Prize is touring selected cinemas with its director in attendance from November 16 - 19.

On Novmeber 19, Stefan Hayn will be presenting MOSES UND ARON (West Germany 1974) by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub and HUNDERT BLATT SCHREIBBLOCK (BRD 1969) by Vlado Kristl – the short film is also in memory of Carola Regnier, who loved Kristl’s works, knew how to read his poems and lived with his paintings. Kristl went from painting to film, from Yugoslavia to West Germany, where he then tried to paint his way back out of the cinema. He drew one of the posters for MOSES UND ARON.

Dubai and Neverland mark places at which the world of dreams and reality flow into one another and the distance between reality and representation dwindles. Filmmaker Christian von Borries (*1961) explores how this phenomenon expresses societal processes in his two documentary essay films, both of which move beyond classic documentary forms. In THE DUBAI IN ME – RENDERING THE WORLD (Germany 2010), the business city of Dubai and its function as a theoretical undertaking and artificial paradise is the focus, as is the real estate association which operates in the guise of a state. MOCRACY – NEVERLAND IN ME (Germany 2012) is a collage of internet and TV clips which examines consumerism, capitalism, companies, architecture and the "charity industry" in Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Pyongyang, Detroit and Berlin. Michael Jackson meets Angelina Jolie meets Jean-Luc Godard. A political pamphlet on the pop sound of the 80s. (1.11.)

On November 8 two films from 1973, stemming from different production contexts – Chile and West Germany –, will be screened and discussed at the request of Florian Wüst: Carlos Flores del Pino's DESCOMEDIDOS Y CHASCONES and TEILWEISE VON MIR – EIN VOLKSSTÜCK by Hellmuth Costard.

Submissions for the upcoming Berlinale Forum are closed now. The festival will take place from February 7 - 17, 2013.

At the end of October, we would like to remember screenwriter, film critic, poet and artist Rolf Richter (1932–1992). As a scriptwriter and co-director, he shot numerous DEFA documentaries with Eduard Schreiber and other filmmakers. He was one of East Germany's most important film journalists and became editor (together with Erika Richter) of the East Germany film magazine Film und Fernsehen in 1992 after it was left without an owner. From the end of 1989, Richter headed the commission for the rehabilitation and re-release of the banned DEFA films from 1965/66. In the period of reunification, he fought for the Babylon cinema to be kept open and gave it a new profile in the form of the Berliner Filmkunsthaus Babylon. Hans-Jörg Rother called him "an out-on-a-limb maverick of the real socialist film scene before reunification and a driving force for the preservation of the East German cinema landscape"; "His thoughts revolved (...) around the internal aspects of society, whose end he had seen coming and whose residues in consciousness should not fall victim to new repression."