The next Arsenal film atelier "City rhythms" for children 8 years and older will take place on April 30, moderated by Anna Faroqhi and Haim Peretz.

City as a place of life is a popular film motif. It is sometimes depicted as being friendly, often as hostile and full of rejection, but almost always as fascinating. Our four short films show clearly how different city portraits can be and how a city's movement can be captured. In VORMITTAGSSPUK (Hans Richter, Germany 1928), objects (hats, cups, collars etc) become independent and rebel against people and daily routines. In SCHATTEN (BRD 1960), Hans-Jürgen Pohland tells the story of a city with light and darkness. WOCHENENDE (Walter Ruttmann, Germany 1930) uses found sound material to talk about the metropolis Berlin. DIE SPRACHE DER STADT (2016) makes a similar attempt when 15 children set out one afternoon with their cameras to see what is going on in the city. After the screening, viewers will have a chance to create their own city panoramas, using expressive shadows.

Like every year, the Goethe Institute in Paris is showing a selection of Forum titles as part of the "La Berlinale à Paris" series.

On April 21st, CASA ROSHELL by Camilla José Donoso and Rati Oneli's MZIS QALAQI (CITY OF THE SUN) will be presented by Birgit Kohler.

Like every year, the Goethe Institute in Paris is showing a selection of Forum titles as part of the "La Berlinale à Paris" series.

On April 21st, CASA ROSHELL by Camilla José Donoso and Rati Oneli's MZIS QALAQI (CITY OF THE SUN) will be presented by Birgit Kohler.

The filmography of the renowned, award-winning Czech director Helena Třeštíková contains over 50 documentaries. Since the mid-1970s, she has been making portraits – often long-term observations – of married couples, personalities in Czech history and also of social outsiders for both television and cinema that are as discreet as they are impressive. Třeštíková will attend our retrospective of her formidable oeuvre, which revolves around relationships between people, social and political upheavals and also the potentials and boundaries of documentary.

Film academies are not only places where students train but places where productions emerge. Since the dffb's establishment on 17th September 1966, thousands of films have been made - long and short, documentary, fiction and experimental. We are showing a selection to celebrate 50 years, from the beginnings to the present.

In view of the quantity of productions, such a retrospective cannot make any claims as to representativeness. It also seems to make little sense to concentrate on graduates who are known and already prominent in daily cinema life. Instead, this is an invitation to discover aspects of filmmaking at the dffb that have remained hidden and yet are undoubtedly important components of German film and television history.

There will be political films dating back to the early days of the academy, as well as contemporary productions that attempt to transpose the radical, political spirit of that era to the present. One focus will be on films made shortly before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall - a phase of institutional upheaval in which the climate at the dffb was particularly open to aesthetic experiments. The curators of the program are Hannes Brühwiler, Ralph Eue, Lukas Foerster, Frederik Lang and Fabian Tietke.

To celebrate its 50th birthday, the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb) is not only looking back but to the future. Its "Shock of the Real" symposium focuses on questions that have always been key to the film academy. Each film asks “What is real?” but to attain the eponymous "Shock of the Real" the distance between perception and experience has to be forced open, tackled in a cinematic way. Searching for this wound is one of the challenges of all new "realistic" aesthetics. At the symposium, international filmmakers and artists will take apart new concepts of reality in lectures, panel discussions and podium talks. It will take place in cooperation with the film magazine "Revolver".

We are focusing on grand gestures for this month's Magical History Tour - on films located in the space between excess and opulence, whose exuberance is manifested either by the director's unlimited personal involvement or by an unfettered artistic vision. However, opulence and excess are by no means an end in themselves, but instead represent the expression of a desire for change asserting itself against manifold constraints and obstacles. Our program features films that are committed to absolute realism alongside ones that find their appropriate form in extreme stylization.