Nicolas Wadimoff's documentary Aisheen [Still Alive in Gaza] has been awarded 2 prizes at the Visions du Réel festival in Nyon: the "Buyens-Chagoll" Award, endowed with 5.000 CHF. as well as a special mention by the Young Audience Award.

Tatjana Turanskyj's debut Drifter (Eine flexible Frau) which received its world premiere at the Forum this year, has been selected for the ACID programme and will be presented at the forthcoming Cannes Film Festival.

The forthcoming Indie Lisboa Festival will be celebrating the Forum's 40th anniversary by presenting the programme Four Decades of the Forum. The festival runs from April 22nd till May 2nd.

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Forum, the Buenos Aires Festival de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) will be showing a programme consisting of brand new as well as older films that have been shown at the Forum.

Farrel, a sailor on a container ship, goes ashore to visit his mother after many years at sea. He travels through the snow-covered expanses of the Tierra del Fuego in icy temperatures to reach the isolated village of his birth. Taciturn and introverted, he wanders through the wilderness as the mountains rise alongside him, a slow and hesitant return. When he arrives at his childhood home, there is no joyful welcome but rather a surprising encounter: the family has a new addition.

There are films that change your life or that influence the course of history or world affairs. The Day of the Sparrow is one such film, the only difference being that it takes the opposite approach in order to achieve this. In his new film, Philip Scheffner, a passionate birdwatcher in his spare time, creates an audacious homage to a particular sparrow which managed to attain international fame in this decisive role. Scheffner sets out on a fantastic search for clues with the meticulousness of a detective, which takes him from the murder of the sparrow by a Dutch media concern to a nearly forgotten holiday resort on the Baltic Sea. His search finally takes him to the fences of various forbidden zones in the provinces and suburbs of both East and West Germany.

It’s high summer in the mountain region around Arganil in the heart of Portugal, where August is spent hunting wild boar, playing hockey, fighting forest fires, jumping from bridges, following processions, making fireworks, putting on festivals and singing and dancing. Starting from documentary sequences, which mainly focus on various bands from the popular local music scene, the film gradually drifts towards fiction until it is impossible to distinguish between what is real and what is staged: a melodramatic love story centered upon a father, his daughter and her cousin then emerges. The film simultaneously tells the story of its own production: a filmmaker looking for actors who puts himself in front of the camera again and again, turning his unhappy producer into the protagonist of the film and acting baffled when faced with the sounds that only his sound engineer seems to hear. A film that is free in every sense of the word.

A selection of Forum films will be shown at the Paris Goethe Institute from April 7 - 14th. The programme will be opened by Angela Schanelec's Orly, a German-French co-prdocution.

In addition to the films from the Forum's main programme three special screenings with films by Japanese master Shimazu Yasujiro are also being repeated at the Arsenal cinema from February 23rd - 25th.

A selection of films from this year's programme will be repeated at the Arsenal cinema next week: Kyoto Story, Nénette, The Oath, Putty Hill and Sona, the Other Myself.