City Tours Starting at SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA
Cinema(tic) Encounters: Cinema Spaces and Initiatives in the North of Berlin
With Malve Lippmann
This tour invites participants to discover northern Berlin through the lens of its diverse cinema and film culture. The focus lies on independent cinemas and initiatives, archives, and transnational cultural venues that conceive of cinema not merely as a site for screenings, but also as a social space—a place for knowledge production and exchange. Stops include Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art at Silent Green, one of Germany’s key institutions for film culture and experimental cinema; bi’bak, where the idea for SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA first emerged; the Documentary Association of Europe; Impression Taiwan; Kino Krokodil, dedicated to Eastern European film culture; Brotfabrik, a long-standing independent cultural centre; and Theater im Delphi, a former silent-film cinema transformed into a unique venue for film, music, and performance. The tour approaches cinema as a vibrant urban practice: a place of encounter, memory, aesthetic experience, and political imagination. It offers insights into Berlin’s unique infrastructure—a dynamic interplay between independent initiatives, international networks, and established institutions.
Babylon Berlin: Atlas of Arab Film in Early 20th Century Berlin
With Irit Neidhardt
Between the 1910s and 1930s, the area around Unter den Linden and Friedrichstraße, as well as the Filmstadt district at the southern end of Friedrichstraße, served as a key site of Arab-German encounters within the film industry. At the intersection of Unter den Linden and Friedrichstraße, an Egyptian entrepreneur operated the cinema in the Imperial Gallery, a future pioneer of Egyptian cinema worked as an extra for Gloria Film, a Moroccan casting agent recruited “Orientals” and Black performers for German adventure and colonial films, and the Baidaphon Company built its international music and sound-film empire. This walking tour brings into view this largely forgotten “tropical Germany” (Zafer Şenocak): a society that, in the words of Elias Canetti, was marked by “a chaotic and unarticulated mass of growth, full of color and life, which effectively precludes any sensation of order.” By uncovering these entangled histories, the tour reveals unexpected connections between Berlin’s past and the social and cultural realities of the present.
The Flânoire’s Berlin: Re-reading the City Through Movement
With Maresa Nzinga Pinto and Karina Griffith
Strolling through the urban landscape, the figure of the flânoire describes a Black person who navigates the city and its surroundings in ways that foreground mobility rather than unquestioned belonging. In her research into Black German cinemas, Karina Griffith defines the term flânoire to differentiate from the classical flâneur, whose gaze often remains unnoticed, the flânoire is both observer and observed, moving through spaces while simultaneously being shaped by histories of visibility, surveillance, and exclusion but also resistance. Through the lens of the flânoire, this four-hour city walk hosted by Maresa Nzinga Pinto weaves together short films, archival traces, and poetic, site-specific interventions to explore Berlin as a landscape of Black memory and movement. Through shared reflections and walking together attentively, participants are invited to collectively re-read the city, tracing how Black histories continue to shape urban space while (re-)imagining its pasts, presents, and futures. Please bring your mobile phone and headphones. Please note that Schokofabrik is not wheelchair accessible.
Please bring your mobile phone and headphones. Please note that Schokofabrik is not wheelchair accessible.
