Berlinale Forum & Forum Expanded

The juries of CICAE and FIPRESCI as well as the Ecumenical jury have awarded films from the Forum.

DE FACTO by Selma Doborac is awarded the Caligari Prize 2023. The jury states: "an extraordinary and highly intense film that, like hardly any other before it, makes us think philosophically about destructive (group) dynamics and the inhuman in human beings".

Forum and Forum Expanded appeal for donations in support of organisations that provide humanitarian aid in Turkey, Syria and Kurdistan after the devastating earthquake.

Powerful documentaries stand alongside highly personal essay films. Features draw on pared-down plots or a penchant for the absurd in equal measure. The 28 films that make up the Forum main programme celebrate the diversity of cinematic forms and explore the predicaments of the past and present in unflinching fashion.

A total of 34 works from 20 countries are being presented at the Forum Expanded cinemas, at the silent green Betonhalle, as well as at SAVVY Contemporary and in the Marshall McLuhan Salon of the Embassy of Canada in Berlin.

Queer flamboyance in Rio de Janeiro, inverted ethnography in Bärwalde and the camera-aided dissections of Sohrab Shahid Saless: this year's Forum Special explores marginalised areas of film history. The “Fiktionsbescheinigung” series continues, while two newly restored historical films round off the programme.

Big changes are coming for Berlinale Forum: Cristina Nord is leaving as the Forum head, Barbara Wurm is taking over. In our podcast we are talking to the two of them together about what is special about the Berlinale Forum and where it is heading, but also looking back on four exciting and challenging years.

Assem Hendawi’s Film SIMIA: STRATAGEM FOR UNDESTINING in this year’s Forum Expanded programme uses a speculative AI to think about alternative futures. In our podcast we talked to him about robots telling dad jokes and why Samuel Beckett is the ultimate a human ChatGPT.

The representation of violence, suffering, disease or physical changes confront filmmakers with ethical and aesthetical questions. Esther Buss sketches out the relationship between corporeality and language in five documentaries showing at the 53rd Berlinale Forum.  

“No matter where you go, the screen is always white.” Julian Ross on Takahiko Iimura’s short stay in Berlin, that shaped his artistic practice in film and video in a transitional moment of his career.

"It takes just a familiar word, a sound, to collapse space": Devika Girish explores how the temporal experience of immigration has been represented in films from the 53rd edition of the Berlinale Forum.

Although international film students at Potsdam-Babelsberg looked at East Germany differently, their work has yet to receive a great deal of attention. Fabian Tietke on the political context in which their films were made and the two rediscoveries from the 1980s showing as part of Fiktionsbescheinigung.