This year we will again screen movies of the past twelve months that are especially dear us. In REVANCHE (Austria 2007, August 4 & 8), Götz Spielmann interlaces two opposite worlds: the red-light milieu and the tranquil environs of Vienna. He combines the story of Alex, the gofer of a pimp, with that of a policeman living with his wife and an unfulfilled desire for a child in a tidy homestead in the country. After a bank robbery, during which a friend of Alex, a Ukrainian prostitute is killed by the policeman’s bullet, the film revolves around the themes of guilt and revenge in a convoluted way.

"Old cinema is dead. We believe in new cinema." Once again a manifesto marking the start of a fundamental renewal. "We" consisted of 26 young German filmmakers and critics including Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge and Peter Schamoni, who with their "Oberhausen Manifesto" on February 28, 1962, heralded the "New German Cinema". With this call and several short works they set themselves off against "old cinema", the plain films produced during the "economic miracle" of the 1950s, "papa's cinema". The first full-length films of "New German Cinema" were produced a few years later. Inspired by British Free Cinema and the French Nouvelle Vague, the signatories of the manifesto, along with other auteur filmmakers, e.g., Volker Schlöndorff, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, created the most various images of West German reality in terms of content and style. An important point of reference in their works was also the National Socialist past. At the center of the selection are debut films and works from the early years of "New German Cinema".

New films by Jean-Marie Straub and Peter Nestler – combined with earlier works. The background is also formed by the question if and how painting, or more precisely, its condensation of time and relation to reality, can be conceived as a perspective for filmmaking.

From August 26 to 29, we will for the first time offer workshops on film mediation under the title "Space Odyssey: Spaces for Film and Video Art". Movie theaters are being rebuilt in order to persist in the digital age. Numerous smaller movie theaters are falling victim to this process. In a time of radical media-related changes, cinema is having a hard time. Against this background, the issue is to take a look at the real and virtual spaces in which cinema is today as lively as ever. We encounter moving images in public space, in museums and galleries, on stage and on the Internet – social realms and spaces of thought that define cinema in numerous ways. The boundaries between cinema and other art forms and discourses are fluid. The architecture formed by all these spaces is an expression of the utopia of a cinema in flux: How can curatorial practice newly define spaces?

Tarkovsky in the summer – this is a tradition that has grown dear to us and our audience over the past 20 years. In August we will screen the seven full-length and one short film of the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-86), whose monumental oeuvre gives rise to lasting fascination.

In July, we would like to invite you to discover films from Cuba beyond salsa, folklore and the romanticism of ruins. The program offers an overview of 50 years of Cuban film production across all genres – it is no coincidence that this span of time corresponds with that of the revolution: Only with the law through which the revolutionaries founded the ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Arts and Industry) on 03/24/1959, did the history of independent Cuban cinematography commence. The name of the institution was meant as a program, the first preamble being: "Film as Art", as distinguished from film as a commodity.

The foundation of the Forum dates back to the crisis of the Berlin Film Festival in 1970, when disputes surrounding the screening of Michael Verhoeven's cinematographic Vietnam parable O.K. led to the break-off of the festival. As early as July 1969, the "Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek" had responded to the weak points of the official festival with a "supplementary program" at the Akademie der Künste. A year later, the "underground festival", as it was called in Berlin's press, moved to the then recently opened Arsenal, where "on the occasion of the Berlin Film Festival" the very first Fassbinder retrospective was shown, among others. The program was so successful that before the end of 1970, the "Friends" were commissioned to organize the "International Forum of New Cinema" as a "parallel event on an equal footing with" the competition.

On July 1, Sweden will assume the Chair of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. The Swedish Embassy takes this as an occasion to organize several cultural programs. At Arsenal, a marathon will take place on June 30 – more than 24 hours traversing Swedish film history – moderated by film journalist and Radio EINS presenter Knut Elstermann. But we will already start off on June 27 & 28 with elevator music at the Filmhaus. From 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Anna Svensdotter (flute) and Thomas Jäderlund (saxophone) will accompany the elevator guests from the bottom to top floor (and back again).

Center of a metropolis, ruined landscape, Berlin Wall, no-man's-land, huge construction site, tourist attraction: the past 100 years of history have left their mark on Potsdamer Platz. From Thursdays through Sundays at five pm, we'll be screening films that, through the variety in their aesthetics and content, are atmospherically dense descriptions of a city caught in the vicissitudes of history.

This marks the start of the series "Film Dialogs", which on a two-monthly basis invites filmmakers to talk about one of the films presented in the exhibition spaces of the Museum für Film und Fernsehen, followed by a screening. Director Hans-Christian Schmid and set designer Christian M. Goldbeck will talk about their work on REQUIEM (D 2006, June 18). Based on a real case that was put on record in a small Franconian town in 1970, the film deals with Christian fundamentalism and bigotry. While studying, a young woman from a strict Catholic family gets into an identity crisis that turns into religious delusion. With this award-winning film, Schmid succeeded, in aesthetic terms as well, in reconstructing the West German provincial climate of the 1970s. (Anke Hahn)