1 COMING FORTH BY DAY (Hala Lotfy) Lotfy’s first feature is not a film about the Egyptian revolution, but it is revolutionary in the way it turns the inner captivity of a young woman outward, and for having been released at Zawya, the first art-house cinema in Egypt.
2 SPECTRUM REVERSE SPECTRUM (Margaret Honda) Larger than life: Honda’s incessantly modulating monochrome in 70 mm makes you want to crawl into the cinema screen.
3 PIERROT LUNAIRE (Bruce LaBruce) An ode to the sound of silent film: With her very own cinematic expressiveness, actress Susanne Sachsse multiplies the three-dimensional theater stage by the two-dimensional film screen to celebrate unconditional desire. Music by Arnold Schönberg, conducted by Premil Petrovic.
4 23RD AUGUST 2008 (Laura Mulvey, Faysal Abudullah, and Mark Lewis) Oral history in two shots. Cinema versus media.
5 THE AIRSTRIP (Heinz Emigholz) A stunning cinematic tabula rasa at the end of Emigholz’s architectural film history, set in the time between the dropping of a bomb and its explosion, filled with flying steaks and music by the Düsseldorf-based band Kreidler.
6 HAMLET IN THE RENTED WORLD (A FRAGMENT) (Jack Smith) “It will be Jack’s first talking movie, in lush colors,” wrote Stefan Brecht in 1971. Smith’s notorious adaptation of Shakespeare, which has been waiting at the bottom of the pool for four decades, now shines on the big screen, thanks to Jerry Tartaglia’s painstaking restoration of the largely unedited footage.
7 HORSE MONEY (Pedro Costa) Characters walk in and out of Costa’s cinematic spheres and historical time. Stillness morphs into motion, instilling the characters’ pain in our memories.
8 LABOUR IN A SINGLE SHOT (Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki) A collaborative film and exhibition project with participating filmmakers from fifteen cities, Labour in a Single Shot sets out to prove that every moment of life is worth being on-screen, unedited. As we walk through the exhibition, labor itself starts looking at us, inescapably.
9 10 TO THE 21: ONE THOUSANDTH OF A MILLIONTH OF A MILLIONTH OF A SECOND (Tacita Dean) Is it possible to film “nano-nuclear-equivalent” explosions? Small projections from behind the wall frame the fragility of cinema and its unique potential: to create a sensual experience of the unknown.
10 MAHA MAAMOUN (Fridericianum, Kassel; curated by Nina Tabassomi) In Maamoun’s first institutional solo show, sounds and images carefully culled from film, literature, and YouTube appeared as if the artist had conjured them by whispering into the viewer’s ear, just as the two lovers in her recent video Shooting Stars Remind Me of Eavesdroppers intimately share thoughts in a public park.
Stefanie Schulte Strathaus is a codirector of Arsenal–Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin, a member of the selection committee of the Berlinale Forum, and founding director of Forum Expanded, a section of the Berlin International Film Festival that “negotiates the boundaries of cinema.”