As part of the short film workshop Minor Feelings, ten participants from the Asian-German community created four short films. The workshop was led by Monica Tedja (Soy Division Berlin) and Dieu Hao Do (BAFNET).

As a cinematic exercise in the perception and representation of one's own subjectivity, the workshop week allowed participants to explore their identities in order to make their stories visible through simple cinematic means.

The workshop aimed to impart both technical and methodological knowledge for the creation of a short film and at the same time to enable the practical implementation of one's own short film idea. In doing so, the exchange and networking of the participants with the workshop leader as well as with each other was an essential part of the program.

COMMUNITY EVENT: The screening is a community event for people who identify themselves as BPoC or people with experiences of racism/anti-Semitism and their friends.

Urbanization, concrete, stone. Next to the most central point of Berlin, Alexanderplatz – stands the building complex Haus der Statistik, which slowly withered into ruin over the past years. In a protest action, artists occupy the building in which the official statistics were made in the GDR. Artists, urban planners and the city of Berlin trying to transform the former GDR ruin into a place for new visions and concepts of city. A place where everything is different than before?

Book tickets

Isis Rampf born 1994 in Ulm studied literature, art and media studies at the Universities of Constance, Cork and Potsdam. Worked in several film production companies and as assistant to director Markus Imhoof. Since 2018 first own films, most recently the documentary “Allesandersplatz”. Since 2021 she studies at the international film school in Cologne.

Short Film Programm, Mexico, ca. 75 min.

Curated by Javier Toscano

I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours.
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry

This selection of short films and video works from Mexico ­stems out of a structure of collective reflections around the ideas of appropriation, political identity formations and the expanded common space on the digital field. The foundational idea behind the production of these pieces is the possibility of interconnecting interpretations and desires through different times and contexts, providing thus new readings of a shared reality. Along the production process —which has followed a common theoretical input with political implications— the authors of the pieces were confronted with the structure of their own cultural engagements. By recognizing their subjective agency, they propose visual fugues and other unconventional constructions to respond to their own cultural milieu, often traversed by different forms of violence, but also by inspiring motifs. 

Chiquitirockers
Omar Casillas, 2010, 21 Min. 

Nothingness Hurts
Mariana Trejo, 2021, 8 Min. 

Land
Jorge Pérez, 2021, 5 Min. 

Memory Game
Andrea J. Linares, 2021, 4 Min. 

Identity and self-representation. ID-objects
Javier Toscano, 2012, 7 Min.

Stream
Andrés Negrete, 2015, 3 Min.

Flight and Fall
Emil García, 2012, 4 Min.

Television Hero
Erika Loana, 2012, 2 Min.

Ana
Johnny Trujillo, 2011, 10 Min.

Narco Nation
Rodrigo Ramos, 2015, 10 Min.

Javier Toscano (born in Mexico City, lives and works in Berlin) is a visual artist, documentary filmmaker and interdisciplinary researcher in the fields of new media and political activism. His work has involved a continuous search to generate and collaborate with minorities, communities and groups with disabilities towards the production of alternative narratives of self-affirmation and vital exploration. He holds a PhD in philosophy and has been a post-doc researcher in media politics in Paris and Berlin.

Book tickets

Lecture and film programme by Erik Göngrich and Florian Wüst 

On the occasion of the Super 8 workshop Kino, Kaffee, Kompostol by Dagie Brundert, this programme created by Erik Göngrich and Florian Wüst offers a historical insight into the models, connections and misinterpretations of the two construction phases of the Karl-Marx-Allee. How did it develop from the Stalinist confectionery style - "democratic in content and national in form" - to a modern, functional systematic construction with industrial concrete slabs? How do we deal with it today? The second part of the evening takes the urban situation around Haus der Statistik as a starting point to show the artistic possibilities of depicting the modern city. Selected examples of documentary and experimental film will be shown, including film clips by Cynthia Beatt, Matthias Müller and Herbert Vesely, among others. 

Funded by the Berliner Projektfonds Urbane Praxis within the framework of the project SİNEMA HERE N’ THERE

Erik Göngrich is an artist researcher, political architect, producer-curator, discursive draughtsman, public-spirited cook and performative publisher. With the projects MITKUNSTZENTRALE, which he initiated, and SATELLIT, he has been running a workshop/exhibition space since 2019, one that addresses material cycles and art in times of climate emergency.

Florian Wüst is a film curator, artist and publisher living in Berlin. His work deals with European post-war history and the social and ecological changes in the process of modernising the living world. Wüst is co-founder of the Berliner Hefte on the history and present of the city.

Book tickets

After the screening talk with Boris Lehman and Christoph Huber, hosted by Tobias Hering.

Symphonie 
Boris Lehman, Belgium 1979, 34 min., OV with german subtitles

Bruxelles – Transit 
Samy Szlingerbaum, Belgium 1980, 80 min., OV with english subtitles

After Amos Vogel had visited the Forum of the Berlinale in 1981, he wrote an article about it for Film Comment. It began with a description of the emotional Q&A that followed Bruxelles-Transit, “Samy Szlingerbaum’s film of his family in the Nazi period spoken entirely in Yiddish. Present-day, nightlit, and empty Brussels streets, stylized tableaux of lyrical power, and his mother’s unrehearsed, taped recollections served as poetic representations of a 
past no longer available.” Boris Lehman, who played Szlingerbaum’s father in Bruxelles-Transit, had already shot a film which is in many ways complementary, Symphonie. “The hero of the film is Jacob Rabinovitch. He is a Jew. In reality, he is Romain Schneid, and as the latter imagines his condition in 1942. At that time, Belgium was occupied by the Germans and Romain, a child of 12, had to live in hiding with a lady, Madame Stine, in Etterbeck, a suburb of Brussels, where the Resistance was forming.” (Lehman) Amos Vogel saw the two films as a double feature in the Forum. The trauma of a man suddenly declared a pariah and the instability of a family in exile must inevitably have reminded him of his own biography. Having fled from the Nazis in Vienna as a 17-year-old, Vogel came to the USA with his family in 1938. The act of emigration, his Jewish roots and the extermination of relatives and childhood friends in the concentration camps left an internal texture that Vogel never denied but also only revealed at seldom moments. These moments were often when he came into contact with post-war Germany, whose seeming convalescence he followed with interest but also a large degree of skepticism. This evening is an attempt to approach Amos Vogel’s relationship to his emigré biography, mirrored in the two films and by way of quotes and texts by him.

“The gatekeepers exist to be overthrown.”
 Amos Vogel – Repeats and Responses is a program of Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art and is curated by Tobias Hering. It was made possible by funding from the Hauptstadtkulturfonds. 

Additional support from Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa. 

Tobias Hering is a freelance film curator, who recently presented at bi'bak the programme Freundschaft auf Zeit (2019) on contract work and internationalism in the GDR. He is currently responsible for the archive project re-selected at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. In this context began a research around Amos Vogel which has yielded, among other programs, the three-part tribute “The gatekeepers exist to be overthrown” 
through which Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art honors its long and close relationship to this New York film curator.

Boris Lehman is a Belgian experimental filmmaker and was born in 1944 in a Jewish family. He has collaborated with several filmmakers, including Chantal Akerman, Samy Szlingerbaum and Henri Storck. He has directed and produced about 500 films and is considered an ‘unclassifiable’ filmmaker in the landscape of Belgian independent cinematography. 

Christoph Huber is a curator in the program department of the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, where he has been involved in the conception of several major retrospectives and is co-curating the series, “Amos Vogel Atlas”. From 1999 to 2014 he was a film critic and culture editor at Die Presse. Huber is the European correspondent of Cinema Scope and writes for several international print and online magazines.

Book tickets

Not Just Roads is an ethnographic documentary film that narrates the story of a massive urban transformation underway in India. Highways are being constructed at an unprecedented rate of 23 kilometers per day under the Indian government's Bharatmala (‘Garland of Limitless Roads’) program. The program aims to open new territories for the emerging Indian middle class. Currently, the territory is inhabited by villages, working class neighbourhoods, and nomadic herders. It is criss-crossed by native trails and vital ecological commons. This film captures the story of one such highway outside Delhi, from the perspective of human and non-human actors. It journeys between working class neighbourhoods undergoing demolition, construction landscapes, protests sites, and the persuasive pitches by the real estate salesmen attempting to sell dreamscapes.

In cooperation with the Georg Simmel Centre for Metropolitan Studies and the Department of Urban and Regional Sociology at the Humboldt University of Berlin as part of the Think & Drink Special Events 2021/22.

The Georg Simmel Centre for Metropolitan Studies and the Department of Urban and Regional Sociology invite you to the Think & Drink Series! The colloquium-style event offers an informal atmosphere for discussion and exchange between all who are interested in urban issues. The impulse for discussion is the weekly guest speaker of German or international urban sociology or a speaker of notoriety in a related field. After the talk– i.e. the “Think” – participants are welcome to continue the discussion with a drink.

Registration for the event via: gszbuero-at-hu-berlin.de

Nitin Bathla is an architect, artist, and educator currently pursuing Doctoral Studies at ETH Zurich. His work focuses on labour migration, landecology, and housing in the extended urban region of Delhi. Aside from academic writing, he work on films, community art projects, and social design projects. www.nitinbathla.com

Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou is a Greek/Mexican filmmaker interested in ethnography as a filmmaking methodology. His films and collaborations include 'The Seven Sisters Indoor Market' (2016), 'The Disappearance of Robin Hood' (2018), and 'Not Just Roads' (2020). He is currently based in Zürich, where he teaches ethnographic filmmaking at the urban scale at the ETHZ.

İstanbul, the same route after three and a half centuries. Inspired by Istanbul-born Armenian intellectual Eremya Celebi Komurciyan’s travel diaries from the 17th century, Invisible to the Eye(Ah Gözel İstanbul) retraces his itinerary in today’s Istanbul. As a cinematic travelogue, the film explores Komurciyan’s farsighted relationship with the concepts of looking, seeing, and viewing on many different layers. In his book, History of Istanbul: Istanbul in the Seventeenth Century, Komurciyan talks to the reader as if he is holding a camera. When his “cinematic eye” is translated to a contemporary setting, an endless path through the multifaceted visual history of this long-standing city emerges.  

Zeynep Dadak holds a PhD in film from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her debut feature, The Blue Wave, premiered at the 64th Berlinale. Including Ah Gözel İstanbul (2020), her films in different formats and forms have been screened at festivals such as Rotterdam, Sheffield and Dokufest. A Medienboard and Berlin Senate fellow, Zeynep is based in Berlin where she teaches film classes while working on her new film.

Book tickets

As of March 16th, it will be one year since the shooting in the area of Atlanta, Georgia, where eight persons lost their lives, six of them East- and South-East Asian women murdered for a racist and sexist motiv. YEOJA Mag will be hosting an event alongside other initiatives which will take a critical look at anti-Asian racism and xenophobia in relation to classism and sexism. The event will feature the work of five East- and South-East Asian artists from varying disciplines whose work directly confront the larger implications of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia both pre and post March 16th 2021 as well as since the Covid-19 pandemic. After the screening there will be a panel discussion where we investigate, amongst other things, how far we have come in a year and how far we still need to go?

This event is organized by YEOJA Mag in cooperation with bi’bak, korientation e.V. and Korea Verband. It is supported as part of the project MEGA by the BMFSFJ via „Demokratie leben!“ and the PartInt-Programm, Berlin.

Free entry. A fundraising will take place.

Yasmin Angel is a Colombian Film director and author based in Germany. She studied Film at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburgs and KHM in Cologne. Her documentary and fiction films have been presented at international festivals such as IDFA, Oberhausen and Max Ophus among others.

Lorena Díez is an artist and museologist, with an interest in the processes that activate the public space, relations with communities, the recovery of collective memory, and territorial tensions.

Book tickets

On a night focused on percussion and deep listening, Laura Robles and Huguette Tolinga will be in exchange of rhythms and journeys embedded in musical memory. Placing experimental percussion inspired by traditional Congolese rhythms from the 60s and 70s in tandem with a flow of „Temporalidades pluri-rítmicas de las Américas“, this performative session is intended to stimulate questions of liberation, migration, earth remembrance and dissolution of boundaries in music.

Huguette Tolinga Lola is a self-taught percussionist. She began her career as a percussionist in the contemporary dance company Jacques Bana and the Group Quartier Latin. In 2010, under the impetus and guidance of the Tam - Tam Company, she created her own group Huguembo, specializing in percussion instruments, particularly the Tamtam, and singing. Her shows thrill and carry away the audience by the way she plays the Tamtams and manipulates instruments such as horn, xylophone, calabash, combining them with her singing, dance, guitar, drums and saxophone.

Laura Robles is an improviser, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and researcher born in Swaziland and raised in Lima, Peru. She will unfold what she calls „anti-groove” deriving from many years of analysis of Folk rhythms with a strong focus on Afro-Peruvian folklore. The “anti-groove ”creates new possibilities of expression in modern jazz and improvised music.

Book tickets