Announcement // Berlinale Forum: Top Picks

Article by Monica Salazar // Wednesday, Feb. 04, 2015

For the upcoming Berlinale Festival, the International Forum of New Cinema will be showing a variety of experimental works that challenge the relationship between art and cinema. Here is a handful of films that caught our eye:

Janina Herhoffer‘s Freie Zeiten (After Work), a documentary that explores the concept of “free time”, focusing on the aesthetics of collective leisure, such as yoga, shopping, and exercise, and revealing the simultaneous absurdity and ritualistic structure of how we unwind.

Jem Cohen (Museum Hours, Instrument) continues his characteristic portraiture of urban landscapes with his newest essayistic documentary, Counting, in which he observes the quotidian occurrences of various urban centres, capturing moments that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Marcin Malaszczak’s The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills is a poetic chronicle of the ephemerality of everyday life. Drawing inspiration from the poems of Charles Bukowski, Malszczak shatters the idea that life is defined by certain pivotal moments and highlights the beauty of the fleeting moments in between.

Al-wadi (The Valley), Ghassan Salhab’s latest film, takes place in Lebanon where a man is experiencing amnesia after a car accident, both unaware and suspicious of his surroundings. This internalized struggle, set against the backdrop of an apocalypse waiting to happen, serves as a metaphor for the political volatility of the region and as the realization of a nightmare.

Ion de Sosa‘s Sueñan los androides (Androids Dream), an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), offers us a post-apocalyptic view of Spain in the year 2052. The film at once confuses our notions of reality and illusion, the past and the future, and creates a commentary on difference and the status quo.

Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia make use of myth in more ways than one in their film H., which follows the lives of two women named Helen as they are both affected by mysterious events in the town of Troy, New York. Not only is the film a contemporary rendering of the story of Helen of Troy, but a play on the opposing human and superhuman aspects of Greek mythological narrative.