Youssef Chahine was a true man of the movies, having done almost every job in the business: directing, producing, acting, editing and singing! He also tried every genre and liked to combine them. The forty films he made tell the story of 20th century Egypt. Yet his culture was global and his films spoke to the world. He put Egypt on the map of world cinema and to his dying day remained an ardent opponent of dictatorship, fanaticism and populism. He was lucid, but he never allowed his lucidity to undermine a thoroughly cheerful and contagious optimism. We celebrate this Arab cinema’s greatest with six of his early films.
Curated by Tewfik Hakem in collaboration with the Cinémathèque française and the Association Youssef Chahine

Following the capitulation on 8th May 1945, Germany became an occupied territory devoid of proper nationhood, and it needed a future. From 1945 to 1948 the American-British -French zone slowly fused into an administrative unity called the Trizone, which became the basis for the Federal Republic of Germany. We Are the Natives of Trizonia (named after a Cologne carnival song) will look at this fragile construct’s film production – which in 1956, the magazine “Das Schönste” retrospectively called “the avant-garde days of post-war German cinema.” An apt description, for it would take a long time until films as formally inventive, daring and unflinching as the films presented here were made in the FRG.
Curated by Olaf Möller

A rare opportunity to discover key works from the renaissance of one of the most influential East Asian cinemas. It was during the 60s that Korea’s first auteur-directors cut their teeth and produced works that were both hugely popular and artistically daring. For a short period, state censorship was relaxed, and this, combined with a strict limit imposed on imported films, resulted in a boom in domestic film production, encouraging Korean filmmakers to meet the demands of the home market. In the process, they changed the course of Korean cinema forever. This season maps the aesthetic, technological and political developments that shaped that movement.
Curated by Hyun Jin Cho and Minhwa Jung, in collaboration with the Korean Film Archive and the support of the Istituto Culturale Coreano