As always, the Arsenal Cinema will be screening a selection of this year's Forum titles over the coming week: BAIT by Mark Jenkin, FERN VON UNS (Far From Us) by Laura Bierbrauer and Verena Kuri, FOURTEEN by Dan Sallitt, MAN YOU (Vanishing Days) by Zhu Xin, NOS DÉFAITES (Our Defeats) by Jean-Gabriel Périot, OLANDA by Bernd Schoch and SO PRETTY by Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli.

The independent juries of the Berlinale have awarded prizes to another three Forum films: The Conféderation Internationale des Cinémas D'Art et Essai (C.I.C.A.E.) awarded NOS DÉFAITES (Our Defeats) by Jean-Gabriel Périot. Nikolaus Geyrhalter received the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury for his film ERDE (Earth). Last but not least, the Tagesspiegel Readers' Jury awarded MONȘTRI. (Monsters.) by Marius Olteanu.

HEIMAT IST EIN RAUM AUS ZEIT (Heimat Is A Space in Time) by Thomas Heise is the winner of this year's Caligari Award. The jury members were Lucas Barwenczik, Silke Johanna Räbiger und Wolfgang Peters. Their statement: Cracks running through landscapes are watched by the camera. Cracks are running through biographies told by photographies and documents. Historical documents take shape and can be experienced. History becomes a river running through a whole century of (family) history giving it an insistent voice. The poetry of diaries and letters remains unremarked by the director - he finds pictures for it. From this wealth of personal documents, which may not exist in a comparable form in the future, Thomas Heise builds an impressive, clear and truly great film.

This year's FIPRESCI prize goes to DIE KINDER DER TOTEN by Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska. The statement by jury members Eithne Mary O’Neill, Suncica Unevska and Ricardo Brunn reads: The actors are amateurs, as well as the directing, the make up looks cheap, the director's didn't even read the novel they were adapting. Everything could have gone wrong with this film, but it did not fail. Instead it brings life to a novel almost impossible to transpose by doing a silent film about the rise of the living dead, which is not only the rise of the repressed past, but also a rise of cinema, using the nearly dead format - super 8, reminiscent of home movies. The result is hilarious, edgy, at times confusing, funny and something not everyone will agree on. But this is cinema: We need to disagree!

Our series Filmmakers' Choice is to be continued on February 18. The program’s curators - Eva Heldmann and Katja Wiederspahn - are linked by a deep friendship and working relationship, which from the start involved watching and discussing films together, especially – in the 1980s - those made by lesbian and/or feminist filmmakers. A central concern was the critical exploration of their own relationships with their mothers, particularly regarding their mothers’ experiences during the Nazi era, as well as the relationship between sexual taboos and maternal love formulated by Louise Bourgeois.

The annual symposium, which takes place in the context of Forum Expanded on February 14, focusses on unexplored, forgotten, or precarious film archives as well as archival projects in different places. Each of them is confronted with local challenges and problems, but they also always touch on global questions, thereby producing surprising connections. This year Think Film is taking place under the umbrella of the Arsenal project “Archive außer sich”, a collaborative series of interdisciplinary research, presentation, and exhibition projects that deal with our film cultural heritage and its archives. The symposium takes place at silent green. All panels, talks and presentations in English.