Open House - DFFB60

From 12:00–20:00, seven rooms will screen around 100 films and four audio plays – over 20 hours of programme in total.

Every films runs in full length, from a 55-second camera exercise to a 49-minute individual film. The selection spans second year films, seminar and workshop exercises, and short graduation films – from 2023 to 2026. In addition we show three films from the academy’s founding decade. The line-up ranges from major festival hits to films never shown before and unfinished exercises, possibly screening on 18 September for the one and only time.

Over 80 directors are represented. Fourteen languages are spoken, including German and English alongside Spanish, French, Hebrew, Vietnamese, Croatian, Greek, Japanese and Dutch; 26 works are multilingual, and 22 have no dialogue at all.

Fifteen films were shot on 16mm, plus two full camera seminars that worked in both 16mm and 35mm.

Seminar and Workshop films

We’re showing 43 works from 13 seminars and workshops, in which individual questions of image and directing were worked on over several weeks – from light in space to the long take and the colour of place, through to the staging of intimacy.

With works from seminars and workshops led by, among others, Frank Amann, Ute Aurand, Michael Bertl, Matthias Fleischer, Fred Kelemen, Caroline Kirberg, Andreas Köfer, Stefan Neuberger, Hannah Schwegel, David Sieveking, Maria Speth, Isabelle Stever, Eva Stotz, Andres Veiel, Reinhold Vorschneider, Henner Winckler and Jenny Lou Ziegel. In addition, there are seven co-productions with Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (rbb), the so-called rbb movies, produced in cooperation each year.

Seminar on the Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus Election

The seminar “Working Documentarily – Elections to the Abgeordnetenhaus (1967–2026)” spans an arc of sixty years. In January 1967, artistic director Erwin Leiser set his directing students the Berlin state parliament election as their theme. Three films were produced: DER KANDIDAT by Thomas Hartwig and DER WAHLHELFER by Harun Farocki, whose shoot was documented by Irena Vrkljan in FAROQHI DREHT. Alongside these, the works in progress from the cross-academy seminar will be screened, in which students take up this same exercise again for the 2026 election year. The students explore (post-)migrant perspectives caught between art studies and wage labour, urban developments from Kreuzberg to the Tacheles in Mitte to Leopoldplatz in Wedding, and give space to feelings of despair and anger, but also hope.

The seminar is led by Eva Stotz (directing), Stefan Neuberger (cienmatography) and Caroline Kirberg (production), supported by Stefanie Gaus (Head of Studies), Angelika Levi (Artistic Directior) and Andreas Louis (Head of Production); documentary filmmaker Soda Kazuhiro will support the editing from autumn onward.

Also:

12:00 – DFFB in Context
Students Ali Motamedi Dehbarez and Soheil Aghazadeh present their data-driven research into twenty years of DFFB films and their circulation.

13:00 – TALK to a SERIAL EYE
Katrin Merkel, Head of Studies of the postgraduate programme for serial writing, SERIAL EYES, talks with alumna Luisa Hardenberg about the making of her ZDF series PUSH, whose second season premiered in May 2026.

15:00 and 16:00 – BOLEX Films
We’re screening recent works from Ute Aurand’s Bolex workshop; eight 16mm reels, projected silently and analogue.