The project "Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice", which began in June 2011, continues to leave more and more traces. After the first presentations in the Forum Expanded program (Angela Melitopoulos, Constanze Ruhm, Harun Farocki), in Bethanien’s project room (Hito Steyerl and students from her seminar at the UdK Berlin) and at HAU / Hebbel am Ufer (Ian White) the artist, performer and project participant Vaginal Davis is dedicating her new "Rising Stars, Falling Stars – We Must Have Music!" season to the Arsenal’s archive. She will present it on a monthly basis from a musical point of view. Her opening film on April 22 will be Otto Preminger's PORGY AND BESS (USA 1959), a film version of the eponymous opera by George Gershwin, starring Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey, Brock Peters and Diahann Carroll, followed by drinks and music.

Moreover, the artist and curator Ala Younis arrives in Berlin from Amman in April. She is the third Goethe Institute Living Archive grant holder and will take part in the project for three months. Her work featured in the three 'Arab shorts' festivals that the Goethe Institute in Cairo organized from 2009 to 2011. On 17.4. we will be pleased once again to delve into unknown cinema worlds with our audience in our monthly public screening. As always, entrance is free.

Stefan Kolbe and Chris Wright, who were both born in 1972 and both graduated from the HFF Konrad Wolf Potsdam-Babelsberg, have enriched contemporary German documentary cinema over the past 12 years with a very distinct version of their own. Their films, with their particular aesthetics, are characterized by a special form of camera work, narrative methods and editing as well as a largely associative, fragmentary and sketchy structure. Kolbe and Wright make films that have abandoned supposedly clear structures. For each film, they try to find a new form in an open process that is appropriate to the protagonists and the subject. Their films about young people in a home or about the inhabitants of a prefabricated apartment, as well as their GDR home-movie compilation all take different approaches, making them a reflection on the different parameters of documentary work.

Stefan Kolbe and Chris Wright's four films have been in arsenal distribution's program since 2011, giving us the occasion to showcase them for the first time and to hold talks with the filmmakers and audience members.

BEYOND THE HILL had its world premiere at this year's Forum where it had received the Caligari award and a special mention of the First Feature Award Jury.