This year’s Summer School is taking place from August 22-24. How can the medium of film make room for social discourse and political action in the cinema and in exhibition spaces? The events and workshops take a look at variety of ways that artistic practice can influence social and political processes, be it through working in a collective, artistic actionism, or spectator-oriented aesthetic strategies that understand reception as participation. The focus is on films or film curatorial concepts that can be considered less as declarations than as political action. Using historical and contemporary examples, the school will look at what had to be done to get things moving in the interplay of image-politics and social practice. The presentations are partly in German language only.

The summer Tarkovsky retrospective is a tradition that has grown dear both to us and our audiences for 30 years now. In August, we are showing the seven feature films and one mid-length graduation film by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986), whose monumental oeuvre exudes a lasting fascination.

10 years after the end of the Second World War, certain members of the younger generation started clashing with a largely authoritarian society. The cornerstones of this “deviant” youth behavior were coolness and criminality, provocation and rebellion against traditional values. The Magical History Tour is showing American classics from the German “Halbstarken” genre together with cinematic representations of rebels from different periods and social or geographic contexts, a showcase of all manner of their spiritual siblings, even the more taciturn ones.

The film critic, writer, and curator Cristina Nord is the new director of the Forum. Since it was founded in 1971, the Forum has taken place as part of the Berlin International Film Festival, curated and organised independently by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art.

Cristina Nord (born in 1968) served as film editor for the cultural section of the daily “taz. die tageszeitung” in Berlin from 2002 to 2015. Her writing deals with a broad spectrum of film forms from the present and from film history. Alongside her award-winning print media work, Cristina Nord has been active as a lecturer and curator for a variety of institutions, including the Freie Universität Berlin, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and the Duisburger Filmwoche. After moving to the Goethe-Institut in 2015, Cristina Nord was the Brussels-based director of programming focusing on southwestern Europe, where she conceived and realised projects from all cultural sectors, all the while remaining closely associated with film and cinema.

The more we are dedicated to preserving, rediscovering, and revitalizing archival films, the more we have to make sure that there is enough competence in dealing with analog film material in the future. For this reason Arsenal is offering a workshop in 16mm shooting, processing, archiving, print intersection and cleaning, digitization and projection in cinema from August 30 to September 4th. Arsenal members and partners will accompany the participants through the entire process: from producing a 16mm film, to digitizing it, then on to projecting it in the cinema, with added insights into archiving and caring for prints. The last day will involve a tour of the archive.

Registration deadline was August, 5.