After its successful screening as part of this year's Forum programme, Arsenal is showing a new cut of WILD RELATIVES by Jumana Manna on August 30.

The film loosely links together different narratives and biographies, opening up a space to reflect on biodiversity, resilience, global justice and climate change, as well as disasters caused by human hand and the ambivalent efforts made to overcome them. We are delighted to welcome Jumana Manna for the screening.

Portuguese filmmaker João Viana (*1966) is currently the guest of the DAAD’s Artists in Berlin program. On August 28, he will present his two features, both of which received their world premieres at the Berlinale Forum.

In them he deals with the effects of colonial history on the post-colonial present in Africa in a formally idiosyncratic manner. In A BATALHA DE TABATÔ (The Battle of Tabatô, 2013), a former solder travels with his daughter to the village where her marriage to a musician is supposed to take place. The journey through Guinea-Bissau is overshadowed by demons of the past that haven’t left the old man in peace since the civil war. OUR MADNESS (2018) also operates with magnificent visual compositions in black and white and red. A woman from Mozambique finds her husband and son after fleeing from a psychiatric institution. Yet both of them disappear again and again, just like the strange hospital bed airplane and the statue of wire she comes across. A dreamlike film akin to a trance, with the characteristics of post-trauma.

This year's summer school takes place from August 23–25.

Keywording, tagging, algorithms, indexing – all these terms revolve around the possibilities of approaching archives and the challenges involved with a data bank. How do you find what you’re looking for? How much are conceptual terms attributed to an artistic work defined by contemporary reception or in turn define it? How do film archives differ from other archives and how can we safeguard something as ephemeral as “oral history,” incorporating it into a meaningful systematics of search functions?

The presentations and workshops at this year’s Summer School are about the practice of indexing in archives, looking both back and into the future: What requirements should be fulfilled by contemporary databanks? Can search functions be developed that will last into the future, beyond the Zeitgeist? What criteria do we need to consider?

Edgar Allen Poe describes the flaneur as a man amid the masses, absorbed by the city around him. Charles Baudelaire celebrates the flaneur's ability to retain his anonymity in urban space and stay an individualist. For his part, Walter Benjamin liberates the flaneur from the widely-cited tortoise metaphor, a being linked only to posing and attitude, characterizing him instead as the “central figure of the modern era”, a highly sensitive soul capable of deciphering the city, wandering the streets, and viewing the urban surroundings with the same mixture of attraction and repellence with which he himself is also seen. An archetype key to the literature of the last two centuries, the flaneur has also echoed through film history since the 1920s in a variety of different forms. In July, the Magical History Tour presents the first generation of city wanderers and those that followed them both before the camera and behind it, expanding the concept to encompass its female equivalent and bringing together ambling documentary and essayistic works – meandering strolls through urban spaces, decelerated observations and conquests of urban structures, explorations of the streets and the crowds that populate them, and reflections on the conditions of modern existence.

Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel (*1966) is seen as one of contemporary world cinema’s most extraordinary exponents of style. She draws on truly cinematic devices to narrate complex sets of relationships, whether those within families or otherwise, and keeps a careful eye on symptoms of individual and social disintegration and decay in so doing, making sure to always address the asymmetrical relationship between Argentina’s privileged and those of indigenous origin. Her plots are minimal and her narratives dispense with exposition – which makes her films’ characteristic aesthetic all the more complex: different elements of sound are layered on top of one another in intricate fashion to emphasize the sensorial and the experiential; her unusual framings produce deliberately restricted images which never show the whole of things; she works with off-screen space and plays with focus, forging images where it’s impossible to say what is central and what is marginal.

Lucrecia Martel’s four features from 2001–2017 all celebrated their world premieres at the major international film festivals in Berlin, Cannes, and Venice. Following her three first films, which revolve around girls and women in the Argentina of today and are set in Martel’s home province of Salta in the north of the country, she now enters new terrain with her long-awaited, hugely acclaimed historical epic ZAMA (2017). We are very happy that Lucrecia Martel will be our guest at Arsenal for a special preview of ZAMA and the Berlin premiere of LA MUJER SIN CABEZA (2008) as part of this retrospective of her work.