CINE ESQUEMA NOVO EXPANDED - Berlinale Forum 2015

How not to be personal? In a festival like the Berlinale, with so much to see, it was in the individual section that Cine Esquema Novo found its curatorship, with open doors for the Forum and Forum Expanded sections of the Berlin Film Festival. Two independent bodies within German programming, capable of generating audiovisual drives with their own personality, which were the basis of the curatorship of Jaqueline Beltrame and Gustavo Spolidoro for the Cine Esquema Novo Expandido - Berlinale Forum 2015: 13 films and video installations taken from over 100 assisted works.

This specific project is the result of a partnership started in July 2014 with the Goethe-Institut Porto Alegre and Arsenal - Institut für Film und Videokunst eV and which, before this year's program, already involved a curatorial residency of CEN in the Arsenal collections in Berlin; a display of this collection and past editions of the Forum / Forum Expanded at Cine Esquema Novo 2014; and the exchange of filmmakers and contemporary visual artists with curator Stefanie Schulte Strathaus in Porto Alegre, assisting the exhibition of Brazilian films and video installations in Berlin this year.

The programming of the CEN-E Berlinale Forum 2015 is the result of a 12-day dive in projects from all over the world that, throughout this period of observation, took shape and became individualized, acquiring the face and body of what CEN, in the last twelve years, has proposed: a free and expanded panorama for the understanding and enjoyment of audiovisual. This made it even more interesting to explore the diversity proposed by one of the biggest festivals in the world, where the mainstream of cinema lives close to the most radical experience of the image. And it is a sample of this last aspect that Porto Alegre receives from 03 to 08 of November (Sala PF Gastal and Cinemateca Capitólio); and Rio de Janeiro, from 19 to 25 at Espaço Itaú de Cinema, within the Directors' Week.

The delimitation of this specific programming object, recognized as Cine Esquema Novo Expandido, continues in 2015 a proposal that started two years ago: that of offering a biennial project with a single theme, interspersed with the full and diverse editions of CEN (which include the Brazil Competition, seminars, special programs and debates). After proposing a dialogue in 2013 (in partnership with the Mercosul Biennial) between the reference work in expanded cinema by Englishman William Raban with five Brazilian artists (Carlosmagno Rodrigues, Distruktur, Guto Parente, Ricardo Alves Jr. and Sérgio Borges), this is the opportunity to share, as the Forum / Forum Expanded organization itself says, an excerpt from the “boldest program at the Berlin Film Festival: the Avant Garde, the experimental works, the essays, the long-term observations, the political reporting and cinematic landscapes that have yet to be discovered ”.

About the works

In Porto Alegre, on 03/11, the CEN-E Berlinale Forum 2015 starts at the Sala PF Gastal of Usina do Gasômetro with the nightmare film by the renowned Canadian Guy Maddin, THE FORBIDDEN ROOM, also shown at the Sundance festival, which brings cast Geraldine Chaplin, Maria de Medeiros, Udo Kier and Mathieu Amalric.

From then on, throughout the days, the curators reveal their works. Portuguese João Pedro Rodrigues, from “O Fantasma” and “Morrer Como um Homem”, and João Rui Guerra da Mata present an investigative documentary with a very delicate look on a Macau fireworks factory: IEC LONG. In the same session, the preview in Porto Alegre of the feature BEIRA MAR, an intimate and claustrophobic relationship between men and the sea of Brazilians Fillipe Matzenbacher and Márcio Reolon.

There is a curious and very personal tribute by Palestinian artist Basma Alsharif to Ruggero Deodato's classic gore "Cannibal Holocaust" in A FIELD GUIDE TO THE FERNS. In the feature film LA MALDAD, the Mexican Joshua Gil builds a fiction based on the stories of his two grandfathers, who “act” as main characters.

North American Jem Cohen, from “Chain” and “Instrument” (shown by CEN at the Zona Livre 2010 exhibition in Rio de Janeiro), brings in COUNTING his “Sans Soleil”: a beautiful and simple one-man trip based on a intimate look through the camera. While FREIE ZEITEN (After Work), by the German Janina Herhoffer, proposes a documentary that can be watched with closed eyes, so as to get closer to the characters (a girl band and a Yoga group) as well as their musician-sound character. .

One of the most recurring themes / issues in the Berlinale, migration policies, appears in the form of dialogue and observation in the films of the Brazilian Felipe Bragança (ESCAPE FROM MY EYES, about an occupation in a central square in Berlin) and the Israeli Silvina Landsmann, ( on HOTLINE - which, as his synopsee says, “has a camera that catapults the viewer into the middle of the action”.

Amid the films, and honoring the debate proposed in its own name, the Cine Esquema Novo Expandado - Berlinale Forum 2015 naturally embraces video installations, which occupy the premises of Cinemateca Capitólio. From Switzerland / Germany comes the colorful, hermetic queer OPAQUE, by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, which features the performance of Werner Hirsch and Ginger Brooks Takahash. And from Brazil, two works by filmmakers / artists who arrived at Berlinale from the meetings with the Forum's Curator in Porto Alegre during last year's CEN: Fred Benevides, with VIVENTES, and Arthur Tuoto (winner of the Cine Esquema Brasil Competition) New 2014 with the film-essay “What We Do With Our Misfortunes”), which appears with his “little” video loop JE PROCLAME LA DESTRUCTION.

In the last session of the program, on November 8th, it is the turn of the work of the renowned Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS AND A POEM. Awarded at Forum / Forum Expanded with this impressive visual essay, also recently shown on the Films from Here: Recent Views from the Arab World program at MoMA, Zaatari puts a refined look at the simplicity of the life of an old owner of a traditional photo studio in Lebanon .

This return to the aesthetic and geographical world of a week through contemporary audiovisual, with free admission, is the invitation of the Cine Esquema Novo Expandido - Berlinale Forum 2015. A realization of ACENDI - Associação Cine Esquema Novo de Image Development, carried out in partnership / partnership with the Porto Alegre City Hall through the Coordination of Cinema, Video and Photography of the Municipal Secretary of Culture and the Goethe-Institut Porto Alegre.

Cine New Scheme:

Alisson Avila, Gustavo Spolidoro, Jaqueline Beltrame, Ramiro Azevedo

At the Movies

The Forbidden Room, by Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson (Canada) 2015, 120min (Forum)

Iec Long, by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata (Portugal) 2014, 31min (Forum Expanded)

Beira-Mar, by Filipe Matzenbacher and Márcio Reolon (Brazil) 2015, 83min (Forum)

A field guide to the ferns, by Basma Alsharif (Palestine) 2015, 11min (Forum Expanded)

La Maldad, by Joshua Gil (Mexico) 2015, 74min (Forum)

Counting, by Jem Cohen (USA) 2015, 111min (Forum)

Freie Zeiten (After Work), by Janina Herhoffer (Germany) 2015, 71min (Forum)

Escape from my eyes, by Felipe Bragança (Brazil / Germany) 2015, 33min (Forum Expanded)

Hotline, by Silvina Landsmann (Israel / France) 2015, 100min (Forum)

Twenty-eight nights and a poem, by Akram Zaatari (Lebanon) 2015, 120min (Forum)

in the  Gallery

Opaque, by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz (Switzerland / Germany) 2014, 10min (Forum Expanded Exhibition)

Je proclaim la destruction, by Arthur Tuoto (Brazil) 2014, 4min, (Forum Expanded Exhibition)

Viventes, by Frederico Benevides (Brazil) 2015, 21min, (Forum Expanded Exhibition)