Thomas Arslan
In Motion
September 11 to October 12, 2025
Born in 1962, Thomas Arslan has been a key figure in contemporary German cinema for close to 30 years. As a representative of the so-called Berlin School, he has renewed German cinema with an aesthetics based on reduction and enriched it with a stylized, everyday realism. With his Berlin trilogy about German Turkish teenagers (Geschwister – Kardeşler, Dealer, Der schöne Tag), he developed a specific form of post-migrant cinema avant la lettre and has shined in genre cinema with gangster films (Im Schatten, Verbrannte Erde), a western (Gold), and a road movie (Helle Nächte). In his documentaries (Am Rand, Aus der Ferne, Am Rand Revisited), he engages with what he comes across with exceptional stylistic clarity. Arslan's films tend to focus less on external processes and more on the description of internal states. A special interest in teenagers and young adults pervades his work, which is also defined by sophisticated music choices and noticeably informed by reflections on film history. Robert Bresson, Jean Eustache, Maurice Pialat, and Jean-Pierre Melville are important references, and other influential experiences for Arslan include films by Shirley Clarke, Barbara Loden, and Orson Welles.
Since his studies at the German Film and Television Academy (1986–1992), Thomas Arslan has lived in Berlin. The exploration of Berlin's city spaces has left an inimitable mark on many of his films – although in Arslan's work, space is mostly narrated through people in motion, be it in Berlin or the Wild West. This can be taken literally: Arslan likes to show how characters move through their surroundings and how they travel, walking alone or side-by-side or driving in a car. His cinema itself is also in motion: Starting from the cities of Essen and Berlin, the geographic radius of his films has expanded over the years, leaving the city behind and stretching into the Brandenburg countryside and later into Turkey, Canada, and Norway. But it always returns to Berlin.
Against this backdrop, this series of films by Thomas Arslan also brings a lot of Berlin to Vienna – first of all through the films themselves, but also because this a guest program at the Austrian Film Museum curated by Berlin's Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art. This collaborative project offers the first opportunity in Vienna to experience Arslan's entire oeuvre, from the early short films from his film school years to his most recent work Am Rand Revisited, produced for an exhibition at the Neuen Berliner Kunstverein – and including the Austrian premiere of his latest thriller Verbrannte Erde (2024). (Birgit Kohler / Translation: Ted Fendt)
This program is part of the series Arsenal on Location funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin.
Born in 1962, Thomas Arslan has been a key figure in contemporary German cinema for close to 30 years. As a representative of the so-called Berlin School, he has renewed German cinema with an aesthetics based on reduction and enriched it with a stylized, everyday realism. With his Berlin trilogy about German Turkish teenagers (Geschwister – Kardeşler, Dealer, Der schöne Tag), he developed a specific form of post-migrant cinema avant la lettre and has shined in genre cinema with gangster films (Im Schatten, Verbrannte Erde), a western (Gold), and a road movie (Helle Nächte). In his documentaries (Am Rand, Aus der Ferne, Am Rand Revisited), he engages with what he comes across with exceptional stylistic clarity. Arslan's films tend to focus less on external processes and more on the description of internal states. A special interest in teenagers and young adults pervades his work, which is also defined by sophisticated music choices and noticeably informed by reflections on film history. Robert Bresson, Jean Eustache, Maurice Pialat, and Jean-Pierre Melville are important references, and other influential experiences for Arslan include films by Shirley Clarke, Barbara Loden, and Orson Welles.
Since his studies at the German Film and Television Academy (1986–1992), Thomas Arslan has lived in Berlin. The exploration of Berlin's city spaces has left an inimitable mark on many of his films – although in Arslan's work, space is mostly narrated through people in motion, be it in Berlin or the Wild West. This can be taken literally: Arslan likes to show how characters move through their surroundings and how they travel, walking alone or side-by-side or driving in a car. His cinema itself is also in motion: Starting from the cities of Essen and Berlin, the geographic radius of his films has expanded over the years, leaving the city behind and stretching into the Brandenburg countryside and later into Turkey, Canada, and Norway. But it always returns to Berlin.
Against this backdrop, this series of films by Thomas Arslan also brings a lot of Berlin to Vienna – first of all through the films themselves, but also because this a guest program at the Austrian Film Museum curated by Berlin's Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art. This collaborative project offers the first opportunity in Vienna to experience Arslan's entire oeuvre, from the early short films from his film school years to his most recent work Am Rand Revisited, produced for an exhibition at the Neuen Berliner Kunstverein – and including the Austrian premiere of his latest thriller Verbrannte Erde (2024). (Birgit Kohler / Translation: Ted Fendt)
This program is part of the series Arsenal on Location funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin.
Link Arsenal on Location