Article by Monica Salazar // Feb. 09, 2019
The Berlinale represents a significant occasion in the world of cinema. Now in its 69th year, the festival, which runs from February 7th to 17th, 2019, showcases over 400 films of varying genres, attracting tens of thousands of visitors from around the world, and additionally hosting thousands of professionals during its 10-day run. It is one of the largest public film festivals internationally, and remains today a significant arena of innovation in cinema.
As a means of managing its colossal scale, the festival divides its programming into over 13 distinct categories, once again presenting the boundary-pushing ‘Forum Expanded’ section of the festival. Negotiating the often blurred lines between art and cinema, this year’s ‘Forum Expanded’ is concerned with the seemingly dissipated tensions between art and cinema, in an era where moving images are omnipresent, focusing on “the changed relationship between the moving image and life as it is lived.” The programming takes place at key venues like Betonhalle, a new location of silent green Kulturquartier on the grounds of the former Wedding Crematorium, Epensberger Rhomberg, the Delphi Filmpalast, as well as Kino Arsenal. Among the wide range of ‘Forum Expanded’ events that drew our attention, here is a short selection of screenings and events we recommend in this year’s ‘Forum Expanded’ category of the 69th Berlinale.
SAVVY CONTEMPORARY
Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin: ‘Shadow Circus’
Exhibition: Feb. 08–Mar. 10, 2019
Plantagenstraße 31, 13347 Berlin, click here for map
This exhibition runs for the duration of the festival and revisits an overlooked chapter in Tibet’s history: the armed struggle for freedom and its entanglement in global geopolitics through the CIA. Questions raised will touch upon collective intelligence, surveillance, decolonisation and the post-Cold War world.
KINO ARSENAL
Eduardo Williams and Mariano Blatt: Parsi
Screening: Feb. 09, 2019; 5:30pm
Potsdamer Straße 2, 10785 Berlin, click here for map
Screening: Feb. 10, 2019; 2pm
silent green Kulturquartier, Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin, click here for map
“No es” (It isn’t) is a cumulative poem by Mariano Blatt, which is constantly written over the course of a lifetime. Eduardo Williams’s film Parsi finds itself in a perpetual movement through spaces and around people. We are taken on a breathless ride through bustling neighborhoods, from person to person, thrown, dipped under water, rushed from image to image, creating in the process yet another poem which is caressed by, crashes into, and spins next to “No es”.
KINO ARSENAL
Lene Berg: False Belief
Screening: Feb. 10, 2019; 12:30pm
Potsdamer Straße 2, 10785 Berlin, click here for map
Screening: Feb. 11, 2019; 5pm
silent green Kulturquartier, Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin, click here for map
False Belief is the love story of a couple caught up in the gentrification of a neighbourhood that is wiping out a seminal African-American cultural legacy and displacing its original residents. In 2008, Norwegian artist and filmmaker Lene Berg moved in with her partner, a Black New York publisher, who will be referred to as D. After giving a statement to the police about being harassed by his neighbor in Harlem, D. was arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned. But, for what exactly? His arrest initiated a journey over the course of which D.’s faith in the American justice system put everything he cherished in life at risk.
CINESTAR 8
Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy: DADDA: Poodle House Saloon
Screening: Feb. 10, 2019; 10pm
Potsdamer Straße 4, 10785 Berlin, click here for map
Screening: Feb. 12, 2019; 5pm
silent green Kulturquartier, Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin, click here for map
This is the first of five feature-length chapters made in the Saloon. These are part of a larger series of 20 feature-length chapters of CSSC/DADDA Coach Stage Stage Coach/Donald And Daisy Duck Adventure, a pseudo western series and a meditation on mediated violence. Over the course of the first film, Donald Duck, his wife Daisy Duck, their daughter Bonkers, Nancy Reagan, Andy Warhol, John Wayne, Mini, Heidi, Poncho, and the Cartwrights abuse, torture, and kill each other in the typically absurd fashion of Paul McCarthy’s earlier works.
DELPHI FILMPALAST
Stephan Geene: Shayne
Screening: Feb. 12, 2019; 9pm
Kantstraße 12a, 10623 Berlin, click here for map
Screening: Feb. 13, 2019; 5pm
silent green Kulturquartier, Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin, click here for map
Geene’s film follows the story of Ricky Shayne, a child star of the 1960s and 70s, whose swift rise to fame left him irrevocably changed, particularly during the years he spent in Berlin as a child celebrity. The encounter with the nervous, rough-edged Ricky Shayne, today 72, survivor of his own star and teen magazine history (the magazine Bravo alone dedicated two of its celebrity puzzles to him), leads Geene down a variety of paths: including with Shayne’s sons Tarek and Imran, both now the same age as Ricky during his Berlin period and the spitting image of him.
SILENT GREEN KULTURQUARTIER
Deborah Stratman: Vever (for Barbara)
Screening: Feb. 14, 2019; 5:15pm
Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin, click here for map
Vever (for Barbara) is a cross-generational binding of three filmmakers seeking alternative possibilities to the power structures they are inherently part of. Vever (for Barbara) grew out of the abandoned film projects of Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer.
