Another event for children aged 5 and up takes place on Sunday, October 31. “The color is the key, the eye is the hammer, the soul is the piano with many strings” is how painter Wassily Kandinsky put it in 1911. Forms in film also have a rhythm and colors can dance to film music, such as in Mary Ellen Bute’s ABSTRONIC (USA 1952), which shows how sounds move. Evelyn Lambart und Norman McLaren’s hand-painted film BEGONE DULL CARE (Canada 1949) proves that sounds can become audible via colors and forms. Images that play with music on the screen can be seen in EARLY ABSTRACTIONS by Harry Smith (USA 1939–1956). And Bärbel Neubauer’s MONDLICHT (Germany 1997) presents how forms are created in a particular rhythm by scratches on the film strip and disappear again. Following the screening, all the children can paint their own rhythms and take them home with them.

Another event for childre aged 5 and up follows on Sunday October 10, also as part of the Abbas Kiarostami Retrospective. From the beginning of the 70s, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami worked for the film department of the newly founded “Kanoon” in Tehran, an institute for the intellectual development of children and young people. Here he shot short films for children and young people, including educational films and fiction works using motifs from their everyday surroundings. The film TWO SOLUTIONS FOR ONE PROBLEM (1975) conveys how children resolve conflicts in humorous, but also instructive fashion. COLOURS (1976) goes cheerfully looking for colors in real life. SO CAN I (1975) places a focus on the movements of animals and people: can you jump like a kangaroo, crawl like a caterpillar, and climb like an ape? Kiarostami’s first short THE BREAD AND ALLEY (1970) accompanies a little boy on his way back home from the bakery. Without dialogue, the black-and-white film is the story of the test of courage that the little boy must pass in the alley. (sts) The film program will be accompanied by a spoken translation.

As part of the Abbas Kiarostami Retrospective, the Arsenal Filmatelier presents moderated film program for those in the 7th grade and upwards with two early works by the Iranian director. Adolescents in pre-revolutionary Tehran are at the heart of both films, who master their lives almost completely alone despite various adversities. The poetic feature TAJROBEH (Experience, 1973) shows a 14-year-old who works for a photographer. The small amount of dialogue, the observant camera, the black-and-white images, and the focus on one character allow the audience to look freely at a plot which only unfolds slowly. For its part, the color film LEBASSI BARAYE AROSSI (A Wedding Suit, 1976) narrates a dramatic conflict between three teenagers who work in the same building. The plot pivots on a tailor-made suit, which plunges the boys into a tense web of relationships. Please register in advance.

Our next event for children aged 6 and up is on Sunday, October 3. Through the camera, the world becomes a laboratory for possible stories that can only be discovered by seeing and experiencing. This is how Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb, and James Agee approached depicting life on the street in a poor district of New York, calling their film simply IN THE STREET (USA 1948). Nearly 60 years later, Khaled Mzher did the same in a street in Jordan and came across STREET’S ANGELS (Jordan 2017). Like a detective, Milena Gierke finds starting points for possible mysteries and stories from her car in AUTOBLICKE / VIEWS FROM A CAR (Germany 1990). The children of EKT Regenbogen-Kidz use everyday objects to create a cinematic spell in KINOZAUBER (Germany 2020), that functions as an invitation to dream and to tell stories. We will be watching four films together in which random observation plays a role. Following the screening, we will be putting together our own joint world laboratory.

The revival of Cinema 16's first "Children's Cinema" program from 1958 traces a historical trail also followed by Big Cinema, Small Cinema, a program in which children watch experimental cinema over and over again. In Lotte Reiniger’s silhouette film THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER (1954), a grasshopper gets insects to dance in a meadow of flowers. In PARADE (1952), Charles and Ray Eames create a musical pageant with colorful backdrops: Kinetic toys, richly decorated puppets, and papier-mâché figures come to life. Shirley Clarke’s IN PARIS PARKS (1954) takes us to real locations and follows children playing in picturesque parks. A rush of color is guaranteed by Len Lye's partially hand-painted film RAINBOW DANCE (1936), which shows a dancer on the move. In THE BALLOONATIC (1923), the comic Buster Keaton is put to the test on water, land and in the air. For all those aged five and above. (9/26) (sts)

After a one-year break, the Arsenal summer school will be back from August 19-21, dedicated to the silent green project The Garden. Long-term friends and collaborators of Derek Jarman – costume designer Annie Symons, artist Peter Fillingham, photographer Howard Sooley, filmmakers David Lewis, composer Simon Fisher Turner, and producer James Mackay, supported by author and poet Mary Katharine Tramontana and curator and author Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe – will draw on photos and film excerpts to speak about Jarman’s cinema as a collaborative project. In addition, the artists and curators Dagie Brundert, Peter Cusack, Bettina Ellerkamp, Jörg Heitmann, Philip Scheffner, Kerstin Schroedinger / Oliver Husain, and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus will discuss their contributions to the group exhibition The Garden. Cinematographies of the Earth.

Few places available left – please register until August, 16.