This year, many great SPECIALS complete our festival programme. Their line-up could not be more diverse: Women’s football, film history, self-portraits and portraits, feminist mentoring, a large panel discussion on film culture in the city and in the countryside and »Image immersion«, our homage to Birgit Hein.

The Festival presents the sensual, spatial and pictorial film experiences of one of the most important film artists of the post-war era, Birgit Hein. The artistic career of this experimental film-maker, who died in 2023, began in Cologne where she helped shape the city’s subculture as co-founder of X-SCREEN. Her artistic development from the beginnings of structural film-making back to the archetypal images of a childhood during World War II was profoundly influenced by the search for images of destruction / / destroyed images.

The programme will show the Birgit Hein portrait Im Spiegel der Bilder (2001) by Karin Jurschick as well as two experimental films by Birgit Hein: Rohfilm (1968, co-directed by Wilhelm Hein) and Kriegsbilder (2001).

Afterwards, Matthias Müller, filmmaker and Professor of Experimental Film at the KHM, and Maxa Zoller will reminisce about Birgit Hein in a joint discussion.

In co-operation with Köln im Film

21 April, 12:00 Filmforum NRW, more information and tickets