On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Berlinale section Forum Expanded, 19 Going on 20 brings together short films from the last 19 festival editions, providing an insight into the wide variety of cinematic forms that make up the Forum Expanded.

Twofold mise-en-scène. Views of a city and a family. Political Berlin, private Franconia. Painting within the film image. Realities observed within a necessarily shifting frame. A mobile phone film with the potential for deceleration. A social medium.

Tasked with shielding her from the news of her father’s death, young soldier Atom escorts Claudette on a road trip into the conflict-ridden Armenian countryside. A hallucinatory odyssey through the mythologies of a nation in a state of permanent war.

Brothers Ziad and Moody spend their last day in their family home, which is scheduled for demolition. As they move furniture outside, Moody turns on the TV to pass the time, and they hear news about the demolition of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem.

In 2015, in Damascus, the Basateen al-Razi district and its orchards were razed to the ground as punishment for the population’s uprising against the regime. Having lost everything, two former residents recall their neighborhood.

The augmented reality installation Alternative Monument for Germany (ADfD) commemorates migration from queer, feminist, and migrant perspectives. During the Berlinale, ADfD will be at Silent Green’s garden, accessible via the Monuments AR app.

Sasha is non-binary and came to Israel from the Soviet Union as a child in the 1990s. Haunted by memories, they visit the houses they used to live in. A quiet meditation in black and white on what it means to feel at home in a house, a body, and in time.

A projection-based installation explores the aftermath of displacement following the creation of a massive dam in the southern Indian state of Telangana. Archival material from three generations of researchers meet on the surface of a screen.

An alcoholic woman and an ailing man forge a life-affirming bond, but old habits die hard. Kang Mi-ja’s austere drama with the great Han Ye-ri in the lead casts an unsparing eye on the ill-fated romance between two lonely souls, crippled by their past.

A military-set post-horror. Educating monsters. History teacher Alina is received coldly upon bringing her son Serik to the cadet school that will make him a man. A pupil dies, as the smell of past corpses emanates from the cellar of the present.

Since 1986, the Caligari Film Award honors an innovative film from the Berlinale Forum programme. The €4,000 award, sponsored by the municipal cinemas and the streaming service filmfriend, is split between the director and the distributor.

Moving through Italy’s regions, the De Serio brothers come across an alternative popular culture and shoot a square-shaped film about polyvocal songs, music ethnology and oral tradition. Radically contemporary, energetic, close to nature, local. Lyrical.

The end of the world described in four letters written by native Brazilians in the 17th century: Cartas do Absurdo deals with the devastating effects of the genocide of Brazil’s Indigenous peoples over the last five centuries.

This video installation explores Changgyeonggung, a strange place where a zoo, amusement park, and palaces coexist. After uncovering its tragic history, the place – once associated with childhood memories – is stripped of its emotional appeal.

Spring, summer, autumn, winter... still war in Lviv, western Ukraine. Torn between normality and a state of emergency. For one year, Mansky follows the life cycle of a society’s grieving rites and everyday rituals, where death is the order of the day.

Genealogy, uncomfortable questions and reams of archival material are Tavares-Abel’s tools in discovering the political truths of her family and the Dominican Republic. Election fraud and dictatorship are frighteningly topical. Activism suggests itself.

This film is the sixth episode in the serial-based project X Characters, which revolves around the attempt to update the identities of iconic female film characters from modern cinema to produce contemporary versions of them.

Taking her dad’s job at the Olin Corporation as a starting point, Lee Anne Schmitt interweaves meditative reflections on her biography and her own body with a history of the rise and widespread influence of conservative think tanks in the United States.

A polyphonic narrator – filmmaker, parent, forest, insects, fungi, childcare worker – declares their absolute refusal of labor exploitation, and their necessity to join collective bodies in resistance.

As the child of survivors of the Sinti persecution by the Nazis, Melanie Spitta holds the “thread of the truth” in this film. “Reparations” - a lie! “The courts believed the perpetrators, not us.” Shock, evidence, warning, accusation.

Two young women in the world – a reunion weekend in Melbourne. Em’s on a break, Jessie’s always been chill. Dialogue like a babbling brook, sweet, smart, banal to heavy and back again, honest and unafraid of pathos. A generation of happy wounded souls.

Celebrating Hammer’s spontaneous shooting style and dense editing montage with Carducci’s studied cinematography, the two filmmakers, generations apart in age, shoot the last days of the amusement park Astroland in Coney Island, New York.

Nana Xu travels to the place built by her father as a prisoner during the Cultural Revolution: first a work camp, later a prison, fruit farm and treatment centre. Conversations with last remaining witnesses, where home is still shaped by a repressed past.

Liat is one of the hostages taken on October 7. The film follows her relatives from right up close, with a focus on her father, as he tries to stay on the path of pacifism and humanity amidst war, trauma and diplomacy.

As a “cancer thriver” rather than “survivor,” Barbara Hammer rides through American landscapes changing illness into recovery.