The 2012 program is now available online. Detailed information and screening dates of all Forum and Forum Expanded films and events can be found via the program menu point.

Sandrine Bonnaire is one of the most famous and popular French actresses of her generation. Since her debut in Maurice Pialat's A NOS AMOURS (1983), she has worked with numerous auteurs, including Claude Chabrol, Raymond Depardon, Jacques Doillon, André Téchiné, Jacques Rivette, Claude Sautet and Agnès Varda, and has demonstrated her astounding versatility. She made three films – more than with any other director – with Maurice Pialat who discovered her at a casting session she had accompanied her sister to as a 15-year-old with no intention of auditioning. Her first role propelled Bonnaire, who stemmed from a working class family in Clermont-Ferrand and was the seventh of eleven children, to fame and secured her not only numerous offers of work but her first prize – the César Award for Most Promising Actress. Two years later, she won the César for Best Actress for her impressive interpretation of the vagabond Mona in Agnès Varda's SANS TOIT NI LOI. Her early success is also remarkable because of the fact that the first films Sandrine Bonnaire, who never went to acting school, played in are charac-terized by her courage to take on unattractive roles, her defiance, and a particularly tumultuous physical presence. The physicality of her young years has since given way to a more discreet introverted acting style; but what have remained are her austerity and inscrutability. Bonnaire is neither a downright beauty nor a resplendent heroine. When she acts it is without the pretensions of a star; she is neither facile nor affected, nor is she sentimental, lending her characters depth but also preserving their mystery. Having spent the first 15 years of her career working with great French auteurs, Bonnaire has in recent years worked mainly with young directors. In 2007, she swapped places for the first time to stand behind the camera, directing ELLE S'APPELLE SABINE, a documentary about her autistic sister. She is currently completing her feature film debut.

In January, we are paying homage to the cameraman Boris Kaufman (1897 – 1980) whose career spanned French poetic realism of the 1920s and Hollywood cinema of the 1950s and 60s, and whose name is associated with three great directors: Jean Vigo, Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumet. Kaufman was born in Bialystok, at the time part of the Russian Empire and now in Poland, in 1897. He went to Paris in the 1920s to study philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne, while his older brothers were making film history in Moscow. With their manifestos and films, Dziga Vertov (Denis) and his cameraman Mikhail revolutionized documentary filmmaking, calling for the "camera-eye" to be emancipated from the task of merely reproducing the alleged truth in front of the camera. Influenced by his brothers, Boris began making shorts in France in 1928 and two years later he started working closely with Jean Vigo. The two made some of the most beautiful works of poetic realism before the latter's premature death in 1934. Kaufman escaped Nazi-occupied France in 1941, making it to the US via Canada. His US breakthrough came in 1954 when he won the Best Cinematography Oscar for ON THE WATERFRONT. Kaufman's camera work is characterized by a great sensitivity for the singularity of each film; he finds images for poetry, realism and dreams. "It was always the same thing for me – I had to find the camera style that was most appropriate for the story's subject, and in harmony with it; to look at each new item from a fresh angle; to avoid the same patterns that I had used in earlier films."

With a concentration on a small number of characters and spaces, a focus on inner conflicts and a clear restricted timeframe, the key components of the "Kammerspiel" film genre that came about in the 1920s appear ascetic. But often a particular sense of drama emerged from the extreme paucity of place, time and plot that was conveyed and intensified by the subjectifying use of light and by a moving camera, which in the protagonists' immediate vicinity recorded the tiniest changes in gestures and facial expressions. The film movement, which was inspired by the modern stage design ideas Max Reinhardt had implemented from 1906 onwards on a new Berlin stage that was also called Kammerspiele, experienced its first (perhaps the only one in a classical sense) peak at the beginning of the Twenties and marked the transition from Expressionist film forms to realistic trends. Its resonance in film history is varied, ranging from standard reverential homages to earlier examples of the genre to creative variations on it (or individual aspects). Subjective as always, we have brought together a few for this month's Magical History Tour.

With the addition of a series of Special Screenings to the titles already announced, the programme of the Berlinale Forum is now complete. In the documentary LAWINEN DER ERINNERUNG, Dominik Graf, one of Germany’s most influential film and television directors, puts together a portrait of another leading television personality in the form of author, director and producer Oliver Storz. In the process, his film also contributes to German television history and German history in general. The documentary project IN ARBEIT / EN CONSTRUCTION / W TOKU / LAVORI IN CORSO (IN THE WORKS) by Minze Tummescheit and Arne Hector is structured according to the principle of the chain interview, with the first interview partner leading the film team on to the second and so on. What all of their number have in common are the cooperative structures in which they work. Yet the most important question they debate is that of their own legitimacy: does it make sense or is it even possible to position oneself outside of industrial progress, the public arena of politics or the global market? Revivals and “unearthings” of seldom seen works also have a firm place in the Forum programme. Films by Tom Kalin, Kawashima Yuzo continue this tradition. The rediscovery of the Cambodian cinema of the 1960s and early 70s has been a true adventure.

In the New Year, we are continuing our film series of works by Ulrike Ottinger and would like to recommend the exhibition at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) in which her never previously exhibited early paintings (1963–68) are on show for the first time until January 22. Until February, Arsenal is inviting audiences to discover Ulrike Ottinger's cinematic oeuvre in a series of events that includes introductions and discussions. The program reflects and comments on the complex nature of Ulrike Ottinger's world of moving images, which travel between opulence, stylization, variations on the theatrical and the ethnographic, cultural history, science fiction, reflection and travel.

In her monthly series, the "curatorial mother" Vaginal Davis is presenting GOLDEN EIGHTIES, a film composition made by Belgian director Chantal Akerman (1985). The musical takes place in a fictional shopping mall where everything revolves around love – about longing for someone, putting them on a pedestal, trying to seduce them, meeting them a long time later. Amid the gaudy stores, the snack bars and neon lights, there are tears. There is also laughter, dance and song – "puisque l'amour est plus fort que tout …" The show will go on after the film with drinks and live music. The event is organized in conjunction with the "Living Archive" project and in cooperation with Daniel Hendrickson. (24.6.)

The DEFA foundation and the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation are continuing their joint film series "Breaks and Continuities" which focuses on nine directors who worked at UFA before 1945 or at the DEFA afterwards. Two films by the director Milo Harbich will be presented in January.

This month the peg for our classic children's film comes not from the Magical History Tour but from the What is Cinema? program on January 20, which is focusing on "films full of tricks and magical images". The two meet in Hayao Miyazaki's magical animation film SPIRITED AWAY (Japan 2001, 8., 15. 22. & 29.1.). The film's main character – the 10-year-old Chihiro – is forced to move to a new city with her parents, against her will. On the way, the three get lost and end up in a kind of amusement park where there is an abundance of delicacies but no other people. Chihiro has a bad feeling and wants to turn back but her parents get stuck into the lovely foods and are promptly turned into pigs. The beautiful world turns out to be a refuge for demons from whose clutches Chihiro has to free her parents.