The next Arsenal Filmatelier will take place on March 26 and is for all childeren 8 years and older.

What's ringing, scratching, rattling in the film? Ever since the first cinema screening in 1895, films have been accompanied by sounds and music. Before we conduct our own sound experiments and find ideas for a soundtrack for HORSE OVER TEA KETTLE and play it live, we will discover what can be seen and heard in seven shorts: FLUKE by Emily Breer (USA 1985) travels through air. HORSE OVER TEA KETTLE (USA 1962) by Robert Breer lets shapes and colors fly and lights spiral through the night in LIGHTS (Marie Menken, USA 1965). Machines dance in Len Lye's RHYTHM (USA 1957) and in 4000 FRAMES – AN EYE-OPENER FILM (Arthur & Corinne Cantrill, AUS 1970) the images speed up into a maelstrom. We listen in on a girl in Gunvor Nelson's MY NAME IS OONA (USA 1981). In Georges Méliès’ LE TONNERRE DE JUPITER (France 1903) a planet has unexpected problems with thunder.

arsenal distribution is releasing BARAKAH MEETS BARAKAH on March 9.

After its world premiere as part of last year's Forum programme, Mahmouds Sabbagh's "romantic comedy" was shown and awarded at numerous international film festivals.

The film tells of Bibi, a worldly-wise lifestyle icon, who meets Barakah, a civil servant from a humble background. A remarkably candid love story from Saudi Arabia which uses stabs of acerbic humour as a counterweight to the difficulties faced by the couple.

This year's regional focus is on films from Latin America. We have six works from Brazil, Peru, Chile, Mexico and Argentina that represent a wide range of cinematic forms.

"The Stars Down to Earth": The search for ways to enable art to deal with an increasingly intangible reality provides an essential common ground between this year's selected works. Returning one’s gaze to earth seems more necessary than ever before. But how can film be used to capture something real when that concept seems increasingly hard to grasp? The films and installations of the 12th Forum Expanded approach this question by attempting both to look and listen as closely as possible. One person who has created a cinematographic oeuvre on the basis of these questions since the 1970s is James Benning. This year, he is represented by the three-channel installation UNTITLED FRAGMENTS. Purple colors emanate from the centre of the exhibition: Joe Namy's installation PURPLE, BODIES IN TRANSLATION – PART II OF A YELLOW MEMORY FROM THE YELLOW AGE examines beyond visual representation on the audio track the question of which details are lost in translation and what can ensue between subtitles and the image.

Since cinema began, part of the fascination of the moving image has stemmed from the way in which the bodies of the people acting on the screen are represented: it’s no coincidence that the first ever film footage shows contented workers, men exercising or boisterous children. It wasn’t long before Méliès extended these short documentary scenes by adding cinematic (corporeal) experiments of a fantastical or dramatic nature: images of elegant dancers that disappear as if by magic, images of headless skeletons on the prowl or of heads that inflate like balloons and explode. With these two poles as a starting point, the staging of bodies (and body parts) in film went on to become a fundamental means of cinematic expression whose diverse manifestations have had a substantial effect on how we think about human physiology. This month's Magical History Tour presents notable images of the body from 80 years of film history, showing the special physical presence exuded by bodies of longing, objects of projection, foreign or collective bodies, the reanimated and corporeal hybrids.

"Thomas Mauch, at least for Herzog, Kluge and me, is a cameraman to whom we owe part of our identity as filmmakers." (Helma Sanders-Brahms)

Thomas Mauch’s camera work was significant in shaping the aesthetic appeal and success of New German Film. In the past 50 years, Mauch has worked with directors as varied and unusual as Werner Herzog, Werner Schroeter, Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz. He was also the cameraman for a generation of female filmmakers, such as Helma Sanders-Brahms and Ula Stöckl, who translated their novel and very singular perspective to film in the 1970s and 80s. Many of the films for which Thomas Mauch was the cameraman won prestigious international prizes. His camera work also won him many German film awards.