This year, Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art is putting on the Forum as part of the Berlinale for the 48th time. The main programme consists of 44 films, 35 of which world premieres. This year’s Special Screenings will be announced in a second press release.

21 years after his directorial debut THE DAY A PIG FELL INTO THE WELL, Korean director Hong Sangsoo makes a more auspicious return to the Forum. GRASS is another cheerfully melancholy story about the guests at a small café whose owner loves classical music. Kim Minhee, who won the Silver Bear for Best Actress in 2017, plays a café regular who always seems to be at the table in the corner writing on her laptop. She repeatedly draws inspiration from what’s happening around her, picking up the threads of the dialogue and spinning them further and sometimes even actively intervening in conversations. Is she perhaps the author of these relationship dramas in miniature, whose stores and themes mirror one another?

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.