Mohamed A. Gawad, filmmaker, author, and former Living Archive grant-holder from Cairo is back in Berlin. He is using the opportunity to see one of the films on the big screen that he discovered in the shelves of our film archive at the start of his residency. The Arsenal audience will be there too for this first screening on August 19.

Beforehand, Mohamed A. Gawad will be reading from his text "Time Helix", which he wrote about his time at the archive. Afterwards, there won't just be a discussion about the film, but also about the question of what should happen to it from an archival point of view.

The more we are dedicated to preserving, rediscovering, and revitalizing archival films, the more we have to make sure that there is enough competence in dealing with analog film material in the future.

For this reason we are offering a six-day analog workshop for the first time from August 18-23. Arsenal members and partners will accompany the participants through the entire process: from producing a 16mm film, to digitizing it, then on to projecting it in the cinema, with added insights into archiving and caring for prints. The last day will involve a tour of the archive.

The workshop will delve into the various working areas, covering the basics with equal parts theory and practice. Starting in 2019 the Arsenal will be offering extended workshops in the specific areas.

Dancer, actress, cabaret star, bar owner, and book author Valeska Gert (1892–1978) was "one of the most influential artists of the modern era" (Wolfgang Müller), whose interdisciplinary grasp of art and disdain for standard boundaries were way of ahead of their time. Valeska Gert celebrated her biggest successes in the Berlin of the Weimer Republic. By creating a blend of dance, pantomime, and acting which she referred to as "grotesque dance", she produced what Kurt Tucholsky described as "likely the most impudent of things ever to be done on stage". She danced such themes as "baby", "death", "political assembly", "nervousness" and the everyday professional life of a prostitute in "Canaille": "As I didn't love the citizen, I danced the roles of those he felt contempt for, the whores, the procuresses, those on the slide, those at the bottom." ("Mein Weg", 1931). Her anti-bourgeois lack of inhibition and the wildness of the musical dance numbers she performed polarized audiences and took Valeska Gert all the way to the big international stages. As a Jewish avant-garde artist, she became unable to perform on stage after the National Socialists came to power and emigrated to the US in 1939, where she created a meeting point for New York bohemians in the form of the "Beggar Bar". After returning to Berlin in 1949, her cabaret bar "Hexenküche" was unable to replicate her previous successes and she withdraw to the island of Sylt in the 1950s, where she ran the "Ziegenstall" bar until her death.

We are showing a selection of the films Valeska Gert appeared in between 1925 and 1976. Although she usually only appeared in supporting roles, her expressive appearances, in which she always conveys an image of the independent woman, left a profound impression on the films.

Made in Hong Kong – a label that refers to films that work in a field rich with (film) history and resonance, mining the points where action and auteur cinema, the power of innovation and genre, wild rawness and technical perfection are renegotiated again and again. On the 20th anniversary of the handover of the former British crown colony to China, the ten films from the last two decades that make up "Creative Visions" provide an opportunity for audiences to grasp the hugely varied approaches employed by Hong Kong cinema and enjoy its full versatility, complexity, and dynamism. The program presents works both by major internationally renowned directors as well as promising debut films and forges a path between thrillers, melodramas, action films, sports dramas, and triad shootouts – all of them equally snapshots of a city and its inhabitants gripped by changing times and shifting social and political circumstances.

Walter Ruttman'sBERLIN. DIE SINFONIE DER GROSSSTADT (Germany 1927) is not just the singular portrait of Berlin in the mid-1920s, but also the linchpin of a series of documentaries from the 1920s and 30s which employed rhythmic montage and associative sequences of images to capture the increasing dynamism, mechanization, and modernity of the city: the city symphonies. Tempo, movement, and a lust for experimentation govern these cinematic approximations of different cities which we will be showing in July. The series will also be supplemented by several more recent films which either make explicit reference to the city symphony genre or are related to it.