On Sunday, July 5th, the final day of the Dialogues with Films - Four Decades of the Forum symposium, a central panel discussion on "Independent Film and Festivals" will be held with: Jia Zhangke, Sharon Lockhart, Jean-Marie Téno, Jasmila Žbanić, Christoph Terhechte, the head of the Forum and Ulrich Gregor, the founder of the Forum.

You can congratulate the Forum on its 40th Birthday, share your memories and anecdotes and discuss what the Forum means to you with other users in the Forum anniversary guest book, which can be found at Happy Birthday.

The texts are an appetiser for the Dialoges with Films - Four Decades of the Forum, with the curators describing how they came to choose the films, their personal intepretations of them as well as their relationship to the Forum. The texts can be found on the pages for the individual films.

Brigitte Bertele's film Night Before Eyes, which received its world premiere at the Forum in 2008, has won the Studio Hamburg Young Filmmakers' Award for Best Screenplay.

The Forum is to be honoured at this year's Norwegian Short Film Festival, to be held in Grimstad from June 10th-16th, with a screening of Burrowing and a presentation given by Christoph Terhechte.

To celebrate the upcoming 40th anniversary of the Forum, the "Dialogues with Films: 4 Decades of the International Forum of New Cinema" symposium will be held at Kino Arsenal from July 1st – 5th.

Israeli director Dalia Hager, whose film Close to Home was shown at the Forum in 2006 is among the new scholars of the DAAD'S renowned Artists-in-Berlin Programme.

Zoe Kazan has been awarded best actress for her role in Bradley Rust Gray's
The Exploding Girl at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. Yoav Shamir's Defamation received a special jury mention.

Simon El Habre's The One Man Village is the winner of the international competition at this year's HotDocs film festival. The Prize is endowed with 10.000 US-Dollars.

So Yong Kim won the outstanding director award for her film Treeless Mountain at the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival. The film also picked up acting awards for Kim Hee-Yeon and Kim Song-Hee.