The film festival filmPOLSKA 2009, which is taking place for the fourth time in Berlin and in the past years has been predominantly dedicated to contemporary Polish cinema, will expand this year, not only with regard to the number of participating cinemas but also to the scope and orientation of the program. In addition to current Polish feature and documentary films of the past months, the retrospective titled "The Polish New Wave" presented at Arsenal takes a look at a film historical and aesthetic phenomenon that hitherto has not existed in Polish historiography as the designation of a specific cinematographic trend. Just recently, the Polish curators Łukasz Ronduda and Barbara Piwowarska from the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw introduced the name "Polish New Wave" as an umbrella term for a number of Polish documentary and feature films produced in the past 40 years that categorically reject traditional cinematic forms, take formally radically paths and can be situated between contemporary art and cinema. These initiators of rewriting Polish film history have documented their insights in this film series and in a publication edited by both.

The Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (born 1970) is one of the most outstanding and idiosyncratic proponents of international auteur cinema today. His unique films elude conventional categories: neither unambiguously fiction nor documentary, they do not adhere to narrative plausibility and logic, but deliberately work non-linearly with voids and irritating moments: The films are often divided into two parts, with the relation between both frequently remaining opaque; at times the opening credits run till the middle of the film; there are intertitles, animals gifted in language or suddenly a black hole in the picture. This instinctive freedom of narration lends Weerasethakul’s films a fascinatingly hypnotic effect and enormous imaginative power. What characterizes Weerasethakul's oeuvre, in addition to the documentary basis of his aesthetics and his work with lay actors, is his interest in Thai oral history as well as his adoption of existing popular formats (soap operas, legends, radio plays, comics, vintage films), which he newly contextualized in his films. Pivotal to his work is the topos of the jungle, the place of a different intensity, a different level of awareness, of a utopia or of a mythical realm that opposes the order of reality. His imaginations are based on myths and memories, but at times indeed possess political contours, for the real can be permeated by the supernatural (and vice versa).

A bag falls from the sky, inside: MILLIONS (Danny Boyle, GB 2004, March 7 & 8). What appears as a sudden fairy tale in the orderly settlement of new residential buildings in Liverpool, where Damian, his brother Anthony and their father live after the death of the mother, turns out to be the continuation of fantasy with capitalistic means. For Damian's world is already populated by fantastic heroes – saints. That's why Anthony calls him a weirdo and endorses soberly investing the millions. Damian, on the other hand, wants to act like his holy role models and distribute the money among the poor: a field study is to reveal who is needy in the neighborhood. Boyle creates poetic and whimsical images that tell of the belief in fantasy, not without satirical interludes.

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.

In 1921 the technician, scientist and inventor Emanuel Goldberg (1881-1970) constructed a small but nice standard film camera for amateurs for the Internationale Camera AG Dresden (Ica). In 1923 he equipped it with a wind-up mechanism. Now films could finally be shot by hand – without cumbersome winding. The compact camera was able to take up 25 meters of 35mm film and only weighed 1.5 kilos; per winding, 6 to 7 meters of film could be exposed. "With this model, normal film recordings can be made as one likes, holding the camera in the hand, on a tripod and automatically." (List of Ica kinematographs, 1924)

Visual Music: Cornelia and Holger Lund (fluctuating images) have edited a book with theoretical views on this theme. They approach it from its fringes (music video, expanded cinema, games), so as to lend it a contour via interfaces with and demarcations to other audiovisual forms of production. From the perspectives of music, film, art, festival, and software, they give insights into current events, both in the experimental field and in the context of the club scene. An accompanying DVD contains in part exclusive material of live performances and films by Mary Ellen Bute, Boulez Republic Grand Ensemble, Pfadfinderei/Modeselektor, Paul Mumford, and others.

A new periodical dedicated to film in all its current manifestations: in cinema, on DVD, in art, on the Internet, in intellectual debates, and in pointed references. CARGO mediates between theory and attraction, persons and global interrelations. On March 5 the first issue of CARGO Film / Medien / Kultur will be presented accompanied by the screening of WHITE DOG (USA 1982) by Samuel Fuller. "A film about the retraining of a snappy dog. Because racism is the product of conditioning, the intentional transformation of fear into hate, and because Fuller conveys this insight, without transforming fear into hate, WHITE DOG is the highly peculiar example of a film on racism without racists." (Rainer Knepperges) In the presence of Ekkehard Knörer, Bert Rebhandl, Simon Rothöhler, and Erik Stein.

Vaginal Davis, performer and expert on 1920s cinema, presents KURUTTA IPPEIJI (A Page of Madness, Teinosuke Kinugasa, Japan 1926) within the frame of her series. It is a product of the group shinkankakuha that attempted to counter naturalistic forms of representation. A former seaman works in a mental home unnoticed to be with his wife who has gone insane. The film culminates in hallucinatory sequences in which we experience from inside the patients how the real world dissolves in fear and insanity. On the piano: Eunice Martins. Afterwards drinks with Ms. Davis in the Rote Foyer. (March 14)

Under the title "Literature and Film: Concentrated Dialogs. From the German Empire to Exile", a conference organized by Fabienne Liptay and Stefan Keppler (Free University Berlin and Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich) from March 26 to 28 examines the diverse relationships between film and literature. The start is made on March 26 at Arsenal with a lecture by Thomas Koebner (Munich): "Bourgeois Satire Between Literature and Film – Using the Example of 'Die Hose', Director: Hans Behrendt, after Motives of the Drama by Carl Sternheim". Afterwards DIE HOSE (A Royal Scandal, Hans Behrendt, D 1927, on the piano: Eunice Martins, March 26) will be screened. The satire on hypocrisy and subservience in a German residence city prior to 1914 caricatures the escapade of an official's wife triggered by a ridiculous mishap. Afterwards, drinks will be served in the foyer.