Artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White re-animate the film "Struggle in Jerash" by appropriating the tactic of the commercial DVD director’s commentary, subverting its standard authorial voice and placing the audience at the centre of a copyright-expired film. The film offers access to the process of self-understanding through the careful compilation of new commentary voiceover by contemporary Jordanian thinkers on the first feature film shot in Jordan (D: Wassif Sheik Yassin, 1957).

Filmmaker Florian Schneider has organised a retrospective about Michal Mraktisch for the Berlin Documentary Forum on June 2-6 2010 under the title "Missing Image". This conversation between Florian Schneider and Rick Prelinger, founder of the Prelinger Archives sums up the series "Missing Image".

Video artist Angela Melitopoulos engages Media Activism Brian Holmes at the Berlin Documentary Forum in a dialogue on extra-disciplinary Art Practices and Media Activism while he is presenting his archives and research. Holmes examines four audiovisual regimes that have emerged in the, USA since WW II: broadcast television in the Cold War consumer society; video as a subversion of the televisual norm; networked computing and its new forms of “control environments”; and new communication tactics of migration movements.

Conceived by film-maker Eyal Sivan, the long-term project “Documentary Moments” elaborates documentary film practice through screenings and encounters with film-makers who shaped particular moments of the practice’s history. Its initial chapter is an homage to artists who contributed to the renaissance of documentary film in the post-war period: Alain Resnais (b. 1921), Edgar Morin (b. 1921), Marcel Ophuls (b. 1928), and Frederick Wiseman (b. 1930).

The Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art works on establishing new relations between the conservation and actualization of a film archive. Video artist Angela Melitopoulos engages curator Stefanie Schulte Strathaus at the Berlin Documentary Forum, who presents the idea of a "living" film archive in a selection of feminist and queer films from three historic cinematic events at the Arsenal. (German only)

A conversation between Catherine David and Joachim Koester at the Berlin Documentary Forum. The project evolves around key art works from the past fifteen years as well as new pieces that explore the link between aesthetics, history and politics. David’s prologue to a subsequent exhibition (BDF 2,2012) highlights the work of artist Joachim Koester, who explores the tension between imaginary sites, aesthetic tropes and physical places.

Conceived by film-maker Eyal Sivan, the long-term project “Documentary Moments” elaborates documentary film practice through screenings and encounters with film-makers who shaped particular moments of the practice’s history. Its initial chapter is an homage to artists who contributed to the renaissance of documentary film in the post-war period: Alain Resnais (b. 1921), Edgar Morin (b. 1921), Marcel Ophuls (b. 1928), and Frederick Wiseman (b. 1930).

Cultural historians Ariella Azoulay and Issam Nassar discuss at the Berlin Documentary Forum the representation of Palestinian refugees in photographs from 1947 to the early 1950s. Their conversation addresses theoretical and aesthetic aspects of interpreting photographs, as well as the role photography can play in questioning the dominant discourse on the creation of the State of Israel.

Lecture by Clare Davies

“The connoisseurs of fine living often look back fondly on old downtown Cairo in the 1920s. Everything about life was so French. The pace, the architecture, the settings. Life was unhurried, untouched by pollution and congestion and marked by quaint buildings, café boulevards and premium arcades."

Too Early/Too Late shows certain aspects of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s work at their most radical. But what does the film show precisely? What exactly do we see, when watching those “panoramas” of the French and Egyptian cities and countryside around 1980? What we hear may give us clues: something about history is at stake here. So the question could be: when we are looking at a landscape, what do we see of its history?