On January 1st, 2026,  Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art will become the Arsenal Filminstitut. With this new name, the institution reinforces its future profile and is to be grasped to an even greater extent as a central location for film education, research and a multi-faceted practice that embraces curatorial, artistic and experimental forms of contemporary film culture and how these are communicated.  

How do fatally ill patients face death? And how can you help them fill their remaining time with as much quality of life as possible? In his four-hour institutional observation, Philipp Döring explores these questions by following everyday routines at the palliative care unit at the Franziskus Hospital in Berlin. The film will be available for rental starting November 17, before which it is reserved for festival screening.

Following a construction phase of more than a year, the Arsenal cinema will now open in the Westhalle of silent green in April 2026.

KADDU BEYKAT (Letter from My Village, Senegal, 1975) by Safi Faye has won the third edition of the Locarno Heritage Restoration Contest. The film is not only considered a milestone in African film history, but also a work of global historical and artistic significance.

Art and academic mediator and educator Stefan Aue takes over the position of Commercial Director of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art from August 1^st, 2025 and will now head the Board of Directors together with Artistic Director Stefanie Schulte Strathaus. He replaces lawyer and art historian Anna Mallmann, who is leaving Arsenal after a period of three-and-a-half years.

Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art is now a member of FIAF (Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film / International Federation of Film Archives). At its general assembly in Montreal on May 1 and 2, it was decided to covert Arsenal’s associate membership, which had been in place since 2019, into a full membership.

Wilhelm Hein died on March 15^th at the age of 85 following a long illness. He was one of the most influential and radical experimental filmmakers of the generation that turned cinema inside out from the 1960s onwards. His life partner, photographer Annette Frick, with whom he published the image magazine “Jenseits der Trampelpfade” since 1992, announced the news yesterday.  

We are deeply concerned to learn of the Berlin Senate’s planned budget cuts in the cultural sector. While Arsenal does receive funding from the Federal Ministry of Culture and Media, we see ourselves indirectly affected by these austerity measures.

There were a number of different reasons for the naming of Kino Arsenal in 1970. One of them was the allusion to the silent film by the Ukrainian director Oleksandr Dovzhenko from 1929. We asked the author and film critic Bert Rebhandl to look at the film again from today's perspective. The result is a comprehensive research and re-examination.