Since coming to Berlin in 2007 from LA, Vaginal Davis has been inviting audiences to join her at her monthly film evenings. For the anniversary celebration on October 14, she is dedicating the program once again to actress Louise Brooks, this time in TAGEBUCH EINER VERLORENEN (Diary of a Lost Girl, G.W. Pabst, Germany 1929). Thymian has a special effect on men, soon resulting in a child, which carries certain consequences: after being abandoned by the father, having the child taken from her and being tortured in an institution, she is thrown into a brothel by a shady count. "And Louise Brooks moves through the film in silent beauty, frightened, defiant, in anticipation and bewilderment, as the girl to whom all this happens. Almost like a beautiful, tragic Buster Keaton." (Berliner Tageblatt, 1929).

arsenal distribution will be releasing Calle Overweg's BEZIEHUNGSWEISEN (NEGOTIATING LOVE), which had its world premiere in this year's Berlinale Forum, from October 11. A film that portrays the efforts needed to preserve love and relationships as a work in progress. A set-up whereby therapy sessions are held in the sober atmosphere of a studio. The problems being negotiated are standard ones. The clients are played by actors, the therapists work in the field in real life and are not playing a role. These sessions are supplemented by scenes staged with minimal decor from the everyday lives of the various couples in line with the epic theatre tradition as well as workshop discussions in which the therapists relate their practices to the film team. Documentary elements and improvised acting are combined in distinctive fashion, creating a variation on the documentary which works with abstraction and fiction and is unconcerned with authenticity. Resembling nothing so much as a public experiment, this artificial set-up yields touching moments full of emotion.

In REVISION (Forum 2012), director Philip Scheffner takes an in-depth look at a 20-year-old case: the death of two Romanian citizens in a field near the German-Polish border. Swiftly dismissed as a hunting accident back then, numerous contradictions and gaps emerge when a documentary "revision" commences, as expressed in the interviews with witnesses, experts and, last, but not least, the families of those killed. Following the screening on October 11 at Arsenal, Philip Scheffner, Eduard George Caldararu (Amaro Foro) and Helmut Dietrich (Forschungsgesellschaft Flucht & Migration) together with moderator Grit Lemke (curator and author) will discuss the film and its social and political background.

Düsseldorf, beginning of the seventies. Hans, a young, introverted student of Beuys, meets Ruth, a young homeless woman living in a park. Fascinated by her, he takes Ruth in and makes her the subject of his video work. Ruth quickly settles into the artist scene around Hans, she gets a job as a drawing model at the academy. But Hans is skeptical about her new life, he suspects that Ruth, in her transformation to ‘glamour girl,’ is only trying to get away from herself. For him, she remains the baffling homeless girl that he had secretly fallen in love with, a subject that he doesn’t want to share with anyone. Jealous of his best friend Philipp, he locks Ruth up in his studio so he can – so he thinks – look into her secrets in the test tube of art. Art and life become inextricably intertwined.