What's Next?

The Forum is and remains the section for innovative, idiosyncratic, experimental and unconventional forms of cinematic expression. It offers auteurs and independent artistic works a forum (nomen est omen) beyond the cultural Bermuda Triangle of commerce, spectacle and escapism. The 31 films in the main programme, which enter into dialogue with the eight films in the “Open Wounds, Open Words” Forum Special, aim to expand the idea of what cinema was and is, and what a festival can be. The texts about the selected films and the conversations and discussions before and after the screenings are at the core of the Forum’s programming and our concept of the section. Together with the filmmakers and audiences, we want to voyage to the edges of the familiar and open up perspectives from which film culture – including that of the past and, prospectively, the future – can be understood afresh and placed into a new relationship with the world around us.

This year, the Forum’s films come from six continents and face a world and its people that are in a bad way. They encounter wounded souls trapped between ice-cold systems and brutal regimes, seeking warmth and kinship – from Cadet, a hard-hitting work about a cadet school in Kazakhstan that combines the post-horror genre with the post-Soviet present, to the queer Janine, who experiences tenderness but also hostility in the German countryside (Janine zieht aufs Land (Janine Moves to the Country)) and SIRENS CALL, a breathtakingly experimental sci-fi documentary road trip that follows the merfolk subculture.

Alongside this hybrid feature film debut, there are a remarkable six other feature-length fiction and four documentary debuts in the Forum’s main programme this year. They include the atmospherically rich and sensually affecting Minimals in a Titanic World, which takes us into the Rwandan club scene, the Australian female buddy movie Fwends and the Austrian Wenn du Angst hast nimmst du dein Herz in den Mund und lächelst (If You Are Afraid You Put Your Heart into Your Mouth and Smile). Under the title of “young and brave”, three fresh and critical student works in the Forum Special’s short film programme reveal what it means to start making films in politically, socially and economically vulnerable places. The works are complemented by the panel discussion “The Way Home – Speaking Openly. The Young Generation and Filmmaking in Georgia and Uzbekistan”.