

When the final curtain falls at the Blauer Salon for this year, we know: the scent of cookies fills the air, outside something sparkles somewhere between snowflake and rain, and we get to invite you to the cinema one last time this year – stylishly, cozily, and with a hint of anticipation for everything to come.

On December 8, 2025, the Kino im Blauen Salon invites audiences to an evening dedicated to rediscovering one of the most intriguing yet overlooked strands of West German filmmaking—and to welcoming a very special guest. Dr. Marco Abel, the German-American film scholar whose work has shaped contemporary understandings of German cinema, will present his new book With Nonchalance at the Abyss: The Cinema of the New Munich Group (1964–1972). It is the first comprehensive study of the filmmakers who, in 1960s Munich, swam against the current of what came to be known as “young German cinema,” and who developed a vibrant aesthetic counter-narrative to the dominant postwar film discourse.
On Saturday, November 16, we had a very special visitor: Günter Kautzmann from Leonberg, born in 1940. He had contacted us because he had read on our website that we still use 35mm projection and Bauer B14 projectors. Curious to know what a man of his age wanted from us, we invited him over and had an encounter that touched us all deeply.

Two weeks ago, we celebrated the opening of the new season. The archive lives on! For an entire semester, we will be bringing treasures from our 35mm collection to the big screen. But before the curtain rose for the first time, there were a few surprises. Here is a brief look back at what happened before the first screening.

Vom 19. bis 21. September fand im Offkino Bielefeld das jährliche Treffen der deutschen unabhängigen Kinos – Kino Climates – statt. Drei Tage voller Austausch, Filmleidenschaft, analoger Projektion, Archivpraxis, Networking und familiärer Atmosphäre – ein lebendiges Forum für Kinomacher:innen.