After the Game

A film by Aysun Bademsoy

Team members of a female soccer sports club.

Scene from Aysun Bademsoy's documentary Girls at the Ball, 1995, photo: Aysun Bademsoy

As part of Spätschicht x Outreach Berlin, Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art and the Stadtmuseum Berlin are presenting the film After the Game (1997). The screening is followed by a conversation between director Aysun Bademsoy and film curators Stefanie Schulte Strathaus and Florian Wüst.

Spätschicht – Live Programme at Gropius Bau is a monthly series of free events with an interdisciplinary programme ranging from talks, book discussions and film screenings to concerts and DJ sets. In addition to the screening, you can look forward to a football tournament, a reading, live cooking, two DJ sets and other musical surprise acts.

After the Game by Aysun Bademsoy is the second part of a long-term documentary project following Europe’s first Turkish women’s football team, founded in Berlin-Kreuzberg. The fourth part, Game Changers (2024), premiered in cinemas in May.

1997: The season is coming to an end. The five young women from the first film of the series, Girls on the Pitch (1995), are about to stop playing football. Their futures are uncertain – apprenticeships are scarce, and without financial independence, breaking away from their strict parents seems out of reach. But for now, they are enjoying one last Berlin summer together.

The film is presented in cooperation with Arsenal– Institute for Film and Video Art and the Stadtmuseum Berlin as part of the exhibition Heute noch, morgen schon. Filmische Perspektiven auf Berlin um 1990 on view at the Museum Nikolaikirche from 2 October 2025 to 6 April 2026.

Aysun Bademsoy was born in Mersin, Turkey, in 1960 and moved to Berlin at the age of nine, where she still lives today. For her first documentary film, she worked with young people whose migrant perspective was intended to shed new light on social conditions in Germany. Different realities of life in Berlin appear repeatedly in her observational documentaries, but so do counter shots of people who have left Germany and returned to Turkey. Bademsoy’s films have been shown at numerous international festivals.

Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art is a research and education centre, archive, distribution, festival and cinema. With its relocation from Potsdamer Platz to silent green Kulturquartier, Arsenal will not have its own cinema until the new one is completed in early 2026. The collaboration with cultural institutions in Berlin such as Gropius Bau, arthouse cinemas and partners of the Arsenalon Location project will help to continue and further expand the cinematic dialogue, especially during this time.