Europe often has a rather vague image of Georgia, even if the country has been increasingly present of late: Georgian films and books, Georgia as the guest of honor at the 2018 Frankfurt Bookfair or as a tourist destination have all meant that the country has increasingly entered the spotlight. The Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung is taking part in this year’s Year of German-Georgian friendship with a series of documentary films by female directors from Georgia. This documentary focus shows us sections of this country in the South Caucasus on the edge of Europe without any need for clichés. The film and discussion series presents documentaries which approach everyday life in Georgia with their own aesthetic style and original journalistic research. The films reflect the ongoing upheaval in the Caucasian country since 1989, which creates a modern image of itself as it searches for its place between East and West.

"Film:ReStored" presents digitized films from seven decades of German film history, accompanied by presentations, and progress reports dedicated to questions surrounding the digitization of film heritage. This year's debates focus on the cooperation between rightsholders, authors, and archives. The selection of films reflects this fruitful collaboration.

Films are collective works: The Magical History Tour presents both films that were created in collective working process or have these as their theme, together with ensemble films with suitably starry casts, which forge complex universes in multiple, dynamic mosaics of characters and decentered group pictures.

In the 70s, Harun Farocki made films for children, frequently in collaboration with Hartmut Bitomsky. Taking the phenomena of the world as their starting point, the films focus on forms of transport and transport routes such as trains, ships, roads, bridges, and rivers with noticeable frequency. They also show children’s toys and tools being compared with those used by adults: a stone, for example, with which a child can knock a nail into a piece of wood is contrasted with a pneumatic hammer on a building site and a machine in a factory. Farocki’s precise observation create visible connections between the things strewn across the world and conveys a vivid picture of complex contexts. Following the film screening, the children grapple with what they have seen in creative fashion.

(October 15, for children 5+, moderatad by Stefanie Schlüter and Brigitta Wagner)

Heinz Emigholz' four films entitled "Streetscapes", which premiered as part of this year's Forum programme, can be seen in selected cinemas as of now.

2+2=22 [The Alphabet] (Germany 2017, 88') is a documentary of the recording sessions for the album ABC by German electronic music group Kriedler in Tblisi, Georgia. Sequences in the sound studio alternate with 26 street scenes and 26 views of the director’s notebooks. An event at the Casa do Povo cultural centre in São Paulo forms the starting point for Emigholz’s exploration of the architecture of Samuel Bickels, who designed numerous kibbutz buildings and museums in Israel from the 1950s into the 1970s: Bickels [Socialism] (Germany/Israel 2017, 92').

Streetscapes [Dialogue] (Germany 2017, 132') is a fictionalised dialogue between a film director and his therapist, based on the protocols of Emigholz’s own psychoanalysis sessions and filmed in buildings by Julio Vilamajó, Eladio Dieste and Arno Brandlhuber in Uruguay und Berlin.

Dieste [Uruguay] (Germany 2017, 95') is documentary about 28 buildings by Uruguayan architect and master of thin shell structures Eladio Dieste, supplemented in a prologue by views of three buildings by Julio Vilamajó constructed in Montevideo in the 1930s.