Following 2024’s “Relations & Resistance” and 2025’s “Open Wounds, Open Words”, the motto of this year’s edition of the Forum Special is “Be Human Only, Dish Out the Truth”. The Forum thus continues this successful sidebar, which has established a space alongside the main programme to think about current social and political questions and keep scrutinising the film historical canon, rewriting it, or writing it anew.
The Forum is known for always having given space to cinema’s subversive agents. One example here is avant-garde filmmaker and dyke icon Barbara Hammer (1939-2019), who – like few others – grasped life and cinema in union and always saw the private as uncompromisingly political. She showed numerous works at the Forum, Forum Expanded and Panorama; she loved filming, women, bodies and the camera with great passion. BARBARA FOREVER, the feature-length debut by Brydie O’Connor, creates a monument to this spirited, experimentally-minded pioneer.
Charles Burnett (born 1944) is another veritable Forum legend. The Forum Special presents the restored version of MY BROTHER’S WEDDING carried out by Milestone Film & Video. What is now a classic of Black cinema was first released in 1983 before receiving a director’s cut in 2008, both screened at the Forum. We are very happy to welcome the director back to Berlin, with this remarkably sensitive film about family and neighbourhood, about everyday routines, lived realities and class problems within Black communities.
“The exciting thing about curating the Forum Special”, comments Barbara Wurm, “is seeing how films reveal unexpected potential when shown together. They form networks and connections and group themselves around a thematic core. This year, we are placing a focus on the simple insight conveyed by several films that we can counter megalomaniacal gestures and their accompanying big words with considered stances, stances we arrive at by honing our awareness for the fact that we, as people, neighbours, friends, brothers and daughters, are all only human and that we shouldn’t give up the will to dish out the truth.”
The way we think about being human is being put to the test these days, which has a lot to do with turbo-charged technological developments. Here too, the Forum doesn’t look away from the issue – and interrogates the promise of emancipation offered by AI tools in the face of economic, political and sexist violence, specifically in connection with film production, in a programme of five short films curated by Christiane Büchner und Ariana Dongus. Can prompts generate solidarity?
Whenever the focus is on closeness and neighbourhood, examining the ‘condition féminine’ or shifting attention on to practices beyond the spotlight, female filmmaking is never far away. Alongside BARBARA FOREVER, the Forum Special shows a selection of current documentaries, including a read-aloud film about imaginary meetings between Lola Lafon and Anne Frank (QUAND TU ÉCOUTERAS CETTE CHANSON), Kristina Mikhailova’s RIVER DREAMS about women’s fates in Kazakhstan and BEAUCOUP PARLER by French film critic Pascale Bodet, who accompanies her Egyptian friend Amr on his path (and off-track) to obtaining a residency permit – in refreshingly honest fashion, full of solidarity.
A historical marker of this alternative form of historiography, one that revolves around kitchen conversations, is provided by Chetna Vora’s film FRAUEN IN BERLIN, which was shot in 1981 in East Berlin and was only saved after a print was secretly filmed. Now it has been digitally restored from VHS by the Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF. In conversations marked by how patiently Vora, the Indian film student in the GDR, listens, the private realm becomes a place where real facts gain a subversive connotation, even as the desires and dreams linked to being human and being a woman do not disappear in the process. There are great similarities here to an early film by Hungarian director Judit Elek, who passed away recently: ISTENMEZEJÉN 1972-73-BAN, which screened at the Forum in 1975. Forum legends forever!
The Forum Special is curated by Gaby Babić, Christiane Büchner, Fabian Tietke and Barbara Wurm.
