Berlinale Forum Expanded, independently organized by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, is the program for experimental film, artist’s moving image, video art, film- and video installation, performance and expanded cinema within the Berlin International Film Festival. Founded in 2006 as a space for the negotiation of the porous borders between film and the other arts, Forum Expanded has since grown into a firmly established platform for artists and filmmakers working at and around the margins of cinema, whose works engage with contemporary socio-political discourse at the boundaries of cinematic form.

Artists and filmmakers invited to present work in the context of Forum Expanded are given the option to enter their films into the Arsenal’s film archive and distribution. Alongside the Berlinale festival sections Forum Expanded and Forum and the cinema Arsenal, this collection, which holds more than 10.000 titles to date, forms one of the backbones of the ongoing activities of the Arsenal. Conceived as a “living archive”, it provides opportunities to work with the films and their makers on a longer-term basis than the yearly schedule of film festival presentation allows for. The films presented in this program were all sourced from this archive.

With the program Meet me at the bottom of the lake, Forum Expanded presents a selection of four films from past festival line-ups which delve into the visual, historical, psychological and physical remnants of exploitative (geo-)political formations. Their individual, highly localized concerns, as well as their artistic approaches are varied, but what unites them is the search for moments of rupture and disobedience, of solidarity and support in the face of ongoing oppression and violence. These ways to resist and subvert, to survive and to overcome are found in sediments at the bottom of ancient lakes, in fragments of television news reports, in rock formations on steep mountain gradients and in stories told by crackling firesides. The films incorporate mythology, historical research, personal archives and collective action to examine and re-evaluate fissures and pressure points in calcified structures of power which dominant narratives present as unchangeable:

In NEVER, by Armando Lulaj, a group effort led by inhabitants of a mountainside village leads to the symbolic re-imagining of state memory. Andres Jurado’s YAROKAMENA invites us to listen to a tale of insurrection which is hardly to be found in history books, but lives on in oral tradition. In DETOURS WHILE SPEAKING OF MONSTERS, by Deniz Şimşek, it is a mythological monster which battles for survival in a lake haunted by the memory of genocide and displacement. Finally, MOUNE Ô by Maxime Jean-Baptiste, traces the colonial connections between through glimpses at the life of the filmmaker’s father.