The selection for the 13th Forum Expanded programme, which opens at the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg on February 14 under the title “A Mechanism Capable of Changing Itself”, is now complete.

34 film and video works of all lengths and genres together with 15 instal-lations have been invited from a total of 27 countries.

This year’s programme once again includes a variety of works that use documentary techniques to examine and explore the potential for both cinema and music to question, illustrate, analyse and bring about change in such a way that they are capable of intervening in social and political events on the global stage. In so doing, they also expand the very con-cept of the documentary.

Vietnam in ancient times was named đất nứớc vạn xuân – the land of ten thousand springs. One of the myths surrounding the creation of Vietnam involves a fight between two dragons whose intertwined bodies fell into the South China Sea and formed Vietnam’s curving ‘S’ shaped coastline. Legend also has it that Vietnam’s ancestors were born from the union of a Dragon King, Lạc Long Quân and a fairy, Âu Cơ. Âu Cơ was a mythical bird that swallowed a handful of earthly soil and consequently lost the power to return to the 36th Heaven. Her tears formed Vietnam’s myriad rivers and the country’s recurring floods are the land’s way of remembering her. In her geo-political situation, Vietnam thrives on a fragile equilibrium between land and water management. A life-sustaining power, water is evoked in every aspect of the culture.

Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947) was a master of wittily directed comedies, which bear his unmistakable hallmark and whose popularity and acclaim remain undimmed to this day. A playful sense of levity, subtle innuendo, eloquent ellipses, dialogue accentuated via sarcasm, irony, concision, and exact timing are characteristic of the proverbial "Lubitsch Touch".

Ernst Lubitsch began working as an accountant in his parents' Berlin confectionary company, before he joined Max Reinhardt’s ensemble at the Deutsches Theater as a 19-year-old acting student. In 1913, he was able to take on his first film roles, which were followed one year later by his first works as a director. Between 1914 and 1918, Lubitsch directed numerous one- to three-acters, primarily comedies with a propensity for coarse humor, in which he also appeared as an actor. In 1918, Lubitsch began directing more lavish, feature length films. His first large-scale historical film "Madame Dubarry" and the two comedies "Die Austernprinzessin" and DIE PUPPE, which marked his transition from comedy to satire, brought Lubitsch truefame in 1919. In the year that followed, he frequently moved between genres, with chamber dramas following film epics, and folk plays following melodramas and comedies. As one of the outstanding European filmmakers of his era, Lubitsch went to Hollywood in 1923, where he was able to continue working successfully without a break. He made use of the invention of sound film for inventive film operettas and musicals as well as to perfect his society comedies, with which he, if one believes the quote attributed to Jean Renoir, established modern American cinema. His sophisticated comedies shaped the style of the comedy as a genre of genuine quality, which connected the discriminating with the popular. The recurring themes of the films were the illusion and the reality of high society, love triangles, and the conventions of bourgeois partnership models. Due to the virtuosity of his directing, the subtle art of leaving things out, and the many ideas communicated indirectly, Lubitsch's frivolous allusions and veiled sexual crudities were passed by the censors without comment, even after the Hays Code came into force in 1934.

Arsenal is showing 20 films from Lubitsch's comprehensive oeuvre until the end of January, with a focus on the comedies he made in Hollywood.