LOLAs longlist out; German Film Academy joins forces with Berlinale

Berlinale Competition titles Wim Wenders’ 3D dance documentary Pina and Andres Veiel’s drama If Not Us, Who? and Sundance World Cinema Documentary Competition entry The Green Wave are among 20 feature films, 12 documentaries and four children’s films selected by members of the German Film Academy for the longlist of this year’s German Film Awards (aka LOLAs).

The lineup also includes Tom Tykwer’s Three [pictured] – which won Bavarian Film Awards for Best Director and Best Actress in Munich at the weekend – as well as Doris Dörrie’s The Hairdresser, Dennis Gansel’s vampire drama Wir sind die Nacht, Chris Kraus’ The Poll Diaries, Germany’s first 3D animated feature film Animals United, and the documentaries Neukölln Unlimited, Pianomania, and David Wants To Fly!

Instead of itself organizing special screenings of the selected films for its members, the German Film Academy has joined forces with the Berlinale and the national promotion agency German Films to create a new film programme called LOLA@Berlinale to replace the previous German Cinema showcase at the festival.

“If you look back at the former German Cinema programme curated by Heinz Badewitz, around 80% of the films shown were the same ones in the German Film Awards longlist,” said Linda Söffker, director of the Perspektive Deutsches Kino, who has coordinated LOLA@Berlinale with the German Film Academy’s managing director Alfred Holighaus.

“So, instead of having us curate the 17 titles, we let the members of the German Film Academy select the films to be shown,” Söffker explained to ScreenDaily. “The programme is part of European Film Market and will naturally still be open to all those accredited to the Berlinale whether they are sales companies, foreign buyers, festival programmers or representatives of the Goethe Institutes as well as the members of the German Film Academy.

According to the regulations for this new venture, films such as Pina and If Not Us, Who?, which are already being presented in an official section of the Berlinale, will not have an additional screening in LOLA@Berlinale.

German films will finance the English subtitling for those films which don’t already have an international festival print available for screening in this section.