Vanessa Renwick is in Berlin! Her works have to do with body and landscape, with locations and all kinds of borders. She works in an experimental and poetic manner, eluding any sort of objectification and thus taking a distinct stand. CROWDOG (1984/98) is about the American Indian movement, her "Portrait Series" (2005–09) are dedicated to the efforts toward independence in Cascadia based on music from the Pacific North-West. BRITTON, SOUTH DAKOTA (2003) is a structural found footage piece with 60-year-old portraits of street children. The triple projection, HOPE AND PREY (2006), deals with hunting and being hunted in the wilderness.
In collaboration with EAST/WEST Project (Portland/Berlin). (May 20)

Within the frame of the fourth Gallery Weekend Berlin, neugerriemschneider presents the group show, lost and found, from April 30 through May 29. The exhibition mainly presents cinematic, photographic and sculptural works by artists employing anthropological, ethnographic and archaeological techniques and strategies. In this context, Arsenal will show James Benning's film, AMERICAN DREAMS (LOST AND FOUND) (USA 1984, May 2, 15 & 29), in which the filmmaker presents objects of his collection of Hank Aaron memorabilia. A film about found and lost objects and the confusing spaces in between. The soundtrack consists of alternating recordings of public speeches and excerpts of pop songs from 1954 to 1976, each corresponding with the dates of the shown objects.

Within the frame of the show, Minimalism Germany 1960s, that is for the first time exclusively dedicated to artists working in Germany between 1954 and 1974 in a reductionist manner, a three-day symposium will take place at Daimler Contemporary. As a prelude to the event, Marc Glöde has curated a film program including some of the most crucial works closely tied to the aesthetic of minimalism or structural film. The selection is not limited to historical positions but includes more recent works obliged to these formal approaches. Alongside works by Peter Roehr, Richard Serra, Robert Morris, and Morgan Fisher, films by Karø Goldt as well as Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller will be presented. (Marc Glöde) (May 13)

Cosplay, parcours, yarn bombing, and other (occasionally more decorative) forms of appropriation bear witness to the urge to utilize the city as a stage. But how is power and where are conflicts revealed? The creative classes, armed with coffee cups, cluster through the image-city. Isn't it the case that the indebted cities have meanwhile become the venues of fights for the "right to the city"? Has the city become "our factory"? Is it all about "condensed diversities" or Profitopolis? The UdK seminar held by Madeleine Bernstorff examines documentary and performative image practices in the city, using historical and contemporary film examples addressing the production of space. Based on camera machines, texts and images, at issue are social and physical landscapes, undefined wastelands and the "second nature" of nature. (Madeleine Bernstorff) (May 11 & 12)

On the occasion of actor Winfried Glatzeder's 65th birthday, the DEFA-Stiftung, in the second edition of its monthly film series, will present two films in a double feature: In DAS LAND HINTER DEM REGENBOGEN (D 1990, as guests: Winfried Glatzeder in a conversation with Ralf Schenk), Glatzeder plays the father of the young "rainbow maker," who grows up in a village in the GDR in the early 1950s. Life there is defined by violence and destruction. Together with beautiful Marie, the rainbow maker dreams of fleeing over the rainbow.

It is well known that most films are the result of a joint creative process. As early as the 1920s, film collectives, groups and "factories" were established for not only practical but often also political reasons. In May, the Magical History Tour is dedicated not to the large groups, which we partially already presented under the heading "Pamphlets and Manifestos." The focus is instead on the smallest possible community in the process of creating films: the creative couple that in close cooperation often lasting for years and decades has created a characteristic body of films unmistakably shaped by both persons.

Heinz Emigholz' early cinematic work provided important impulses for the international experimental film movement of the 1970s and 80s. Within the frame of Forum Expanded 2010, we presented an installation of seven films from 1972-1977 at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart. Together with Filmgalerie 451, the films were published on two DVDs. For the first time, the project offers the opportunity to survey the interrelations in this completed group of works: SCHENEC-TADY I, II and III, ARROWPLANE, TIDE, HOTEL, and DEMON.

Until May 6, Arsenal will screen further films within the frame of the Jewish Film Festival that promise unusual, surprising, amusing, and thought-provoking insights into Jewish life across the world.

The remembrance of its own colonial past is only very weak in Germany, the common form of archiving being suppression. How can an archive be created that instead remembers actively, also the history of resistance, and that can be used to conceive a possible future? Cinema plays a special role in this regard: as collective memory, as a place for conveying and updating history in the present. Cinema and colonialism are also historically linked; especially in Germany, cinema was a place of colonial fantasies. But cinema is also always resistive. What kind of cinema is created where, how is it made and how is it viewed? What do center and periphery mean in this context?

One can't stop wondering and has no idea what is happening to oneself when watching the films of the Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes. His two full-length and six short films offer bizarre topics, wild, meandering forms and an irrepressible imagination. They are in many respects idiosyncratic, inventive, playful, frolicsome, disorderly, anarchic, and absurd. Gomes ignores genre borders and narrative conventions, he doesn't play by the customary rules of the game and employs all kinds of means drawn from the cinematic treasure chest. He confuses the levels of time, artfully blurs the borders between documentary and fiction, unexpectedly changes the stops, and jumps from one genre to the next: His films are fairy-tale, musical, comedy, and melodrama all in one. The theme is often coming of age, or young men’s fear and refusal to grow up. Music always plays an important role.