Cinema Futures

The “digital revolution” reached the cinema late and was chiefly styled as a technological advancement. Today, in an era where analog celluloid strips are disappearing, and given the diversity of digital moving picture formats, there is much more at stake: Are the world's film archives on the brink of a dark age? Are we facing the massive loss of collective audiovisual memory? Is film dying, or just changing?

Cinema Futures travels to international locations and, together with renowned filmmakers, museum curators, historians and engineers, dramatizes the future of film and the cinema in the age of digital moving pictures.

Cinema Futures is a documentary film about the present and future of film and the cinema in the digital era. In individual episodes and cinematic aphorisms, future scenarios, cultural fears and promising utopias are sketched out, accompanying the epochal transition from an approximately 120-year history of analog photochemical celluloid strips to the immaterial and radically evanescent age of digital picture data streams. The focus is on a love of the cinema, albeit devoid of nostalgia.

Cinema Futures is an associative journey through time, filmed at international locations, where we meet up with renowned filmmakers, museum curators, historians and engineers. With Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, Tacita Dean, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, David Bordwell, Tom Gunning, Jacques Rancière, Margaret Bodde, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Nicole Brenez, Michael Friend, Greg Lukow, Mike Mashon, and many others.