EL MAR LA MAR by Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki receives this year's Caligari Award. The jury members were Sarah Adam (B-Movie e.V, Hamburg-St.Pauli), Fiona Berg (Kommunales Kino Weiterstadt) and Julia Teichmann (FILMDIENST).

Here is what they said: "The journey leads through the desert, a wasteland. Lying there like flotsam on a beach: a backpack, banknotes, an identity card, a name – the only name in EL MAR LA MAR. The voices that we hear are without bodies; are incorporeal. They tell of the sun, of the heat, of the beauty, of natural catastrophes. They tell of death, of hardship, of pain, and of survival. The endless expanse of the Sonoran Desert stretching between the United States and Mexico.

Light and shadows, space and time; the tracks in the sand and the objets trouvés unbalance our sense of time and place, converting the film into a physical experience. Migration, refuge, and politics: in the form of an audiovisual experiment, the two directors get straight to the heart of existential questions. The journey leads through the desert."

Forum Expanded is presenting the 5th edition of the Think Film conference series on February 16, which is entitled "Archival Constellations" and takes place at the silent green Kulturquartier in Wedding. Eight archive presentations, three archive visits and a performance are planned. What role does the location of an archive play, whether as a shelter, repository, production facility or sometimes even as a danger zone? Archives are movable entities; they can make new connections which bring them to life. The film archive of the INCA (Instituto Nacional de Cinema e Audiovisual) in Guinea-Bissau thus also holds films from the former Soviet Union. Works from the Kiev School of Scientific Film ended up in a contemporary art context in similar fashion. The archive visits lead into Amos Gitai’s exhibition at SAVVY Contemporary as well as into the Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art film archive, where concert footage (including that of Einstürzende Neubauten, Malaria, Nick Cave) from 1980s West Berlin can be seen that stems from the !K7 archive.

The day comes to a close with a special edition of the Rising Stars, Falling Stars series at which archivist and performer Ms. Vaginal Davis will be presenting a small 16mm excavation.

All lectures, panels and presentations will be held in English.

Fernando Birri’s ORG (Italy 1967–1978) is a monstrous film, extremely rarely screened since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 1979. After a 1991 retrospective of his films at Arsenal, Birri left behind a print of the nearly three-hour work in our archive. Only one more print is known to exist in the world.

As part of the project "Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice" the group "Entuziazm" (Michael Baute, Volker Pantenburg, Stefan Pethke) came across Birri’s film in Arsenal’s archive in 2011 and decided to look into it further. It was then digitized and new subtitles were provided.

The new version will be shown as part of the Forum program of this year’s Berlinale. arsenal edition will also release a DVD of ORG featuring additional material in February.

Forum Expanded is presenting the 5th edition of the Think Film conference series on February 16, which is entitled "Archival Constellations" and takes place at the silent green Kulturquartier in Wedding. Eight archive presentations, three archive visits and a performance are planned. What role does the location of an archive play, whether as a shelter, repository, production facility or sometimes even as a danger zone? Archives are movable entities; they can make new connections which bring them to life. The film archive of the INCA (Instituto Nacional de Cinema e Audiovisual) in Guinea-Bissau thus also holds films from the former Soviet Union. Works from the Kiev School of Scientific Film ended up in a contemporary art context in similar fashion. The archive visits lead into Amos Gitai’s exhibition at SAVVY Contemporary as well as into the Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art film archive, where concert footage (including that of Einstürzende Neubauten, Malaria, Nick Cave) from 1980s West Berlin can be seen that stems from the !K7 archive.

The day comes to a close with a special edition of the Rising Stars, Falling Stars series at which archivist and performer Ms. Vaginal Davis will be presenting a small 16mm excavation.

All lectures, panels and presentations will be held in English.