In preparation for the 2nd Congress FUTURE GERMAN FILM / FORUM EUROPA, a 60-page publication dedicated to the future of cinema is now available.

Curated by our editor Kenneth Hujer, The Other Cinema aims to give space to the reinterpretation of cinema and thereby advance it. It deliberately gathers its texts and conversations under a title that already goes back several decades, more precisely: to the year of social protests 1968. Because the future is not only tomorrow, but was also already yesterday. Or to put it in the words of Edgar Reitz: "One often finds solutions and impulses for renewal in the past, in the form of attempts and projects that were ahead of their time."

At the time, "das andere Kino" targeted the established film festivals in Oberhausen and Mannheim, which relegated many works by up-and-coming filmmakers to the supporting program or did not even allow them to be shown. "Das andere Kino" was used by its word creator Helmut Herbst to describe the attempt to find new ways of showing films. In a broader sense, we would also like to preface all texts in our publication with this attitude: Cinema as a place, event and attitude is to be rethought – beyond its ingrained forms. Why this is bitterly necessary is impressively described by Daniela Kloock in her essay Lights on – Lights off?

Once again Edgar Reitz: "When a system like cinema is once again in crisis after its history of over a hundred years, this can be understood as a danger, but also as an opportunity for renewal." This quote, as well as the previous one, is taken from his text Kinotopia, with which we open our publication and whose optimistic sound should, as it were, accompany all further considerations.

Instead of culturally pessimistic lamentation of a possible loss, we look forward to the future of cinema. Although this is not quite the case either, as Sebastian Selig shows us in his text Kinobesuche. Eine kleine Phänomenologie (Visiting the cinema: A small phenomenology): There is not cinema, but cinemas, and consequently more than one way to rethink them. The texts collected here bear impressive witness to this. For example, Daniel Moersener's plea for a non-stop cinema or Simone Arcagni's text Cinema Futuro, which provides us with a vocabulary for conceptualizing the future cinema. Such a concept (albeit with a different vocabulary), in this case for a House of Film Cultures, is discussed in the excerpted transcribed roundtable conversation between Rüdiger Suchsland, RP Kahl, and Gabu Heindl.

Another conversation between Niklas Maak and Lars Henrik Gass combines thinking about new cinema buildings with reflections on the city of the future. Speaking of cinema buildings and the city, the Dutch architecture firm UNStudio explains in an article its cinema design Le Centre Culturel Dédié au 7ème Art, which should have continued the city floor on the roofs of three intertwined structures. The idea was to enable open-air cinema, a view of the Paris skyline, and the convergence of film production and reception.

Angela Rabing and Franziska Wagner use the VR installation Carne y Arena to show that other (cinema) spaces are needed, because some of the current moving images are not only detached from the screen to be perceived as spatial environments through VR glasses, but also want to be explored physically and productively.

Finally, Rüdiger Suchsland incites controversy with his 10 theses on the future of cinema. Drehli Robnik, in addition to his slogan "Warthaus statt Arthouse" ("Warthaus instead of Arthouse"), knows how to develop entertainingly the fact that the repeatedly proclaimed death of cinema is a farce. And because cinema is not only a place but, as already mentioned, also an event, we bid farewell to Hollywood with Vinzenz Hediger and welcome Lagos and Seoul.

Brought together in a constellation, the assembled texts hopefully allow for an exciting reading experience of interweavings, frictions, leaps and productive uniqueness – so that cinema has a good future and we with it.