First Berlinale 2014 prize awarded; German cinema focus planned

The €15,000 cash prize towards the development of a new feature will be shared equally between the two filmmakers who had presented projects at last year’s Perspektive Deutsches Kino.

At that time, both films were documentaries: Metz’s Metamorphosen was set in Russia, while Kaudelka’s Einzelkaempfer focused on cases of doping among East German athletes.

But Metz and Kudelka had each submitted fiction film treatments for consideration for the Made in Germany grant.

Metz’s project, entitled 274, which follows a man on his journey to Manila to end his life, had impressed the jury of film directors Andres Veiel and Frieder Schlaich and writer-producer Katja Eichinger by its “intensity” and “visual power”.

Meanwhile, Kaudelka’s Intershop centres on a love story in the setting of one of former East Germany’s hard currency Intershops.

According to Perspektive section head Linda Soeffker, Kudelka is “in talks” with the producer of her previous film, Lichtblick Media, to produce this new project.

The prize’s recipients from the previous two years - Annekatrin Hendel and Jan Speckenbach - were also on at Tuesday’s awards ceremony in Berlin to give an update on their projects’ state of development.

Hendel has used the prize-money to develop the third part of a trilogy on treachery which she began with her film Vaterlandsverraeter, screened in the Perspektive in 2011.

Speckenbach is working on a musical entitled Das Klopfen der Steine, set in Germany in the years immediately after the Second World War.

LOLA long-list to screen in EFM sidebar

School comedy Fack Ju Göthe (which topped the German box office in 2013), Pepe Danquart’s war drama Run Boy Run (Lauf Junge Lauf), and 3D family film Tarzan are among 45 films to be shown during the forthcoming Berlinale in the European Film Market’s LOLA@Berlinale sidebar.

The LOLA long-list of 25 feature films, 15 documentaries and five children’s films were selected by three committees appointed by the German Film Academy whose 1,500-strong membership will now decide on the final nominations to be announced on March 28.

The feature film committee made additional nominations for 13 individual achievements from films which did not make the long-list. Voting Academy members will therefore also be asked to consider Doris Dörrie’s screenplay for Alles Inklusive, Haifaa Al Massour’s direction on Wadjda, Philipp F. Kölmel’s score for Rubinrot, and Michael Bertl’s cinematography for Mr Morgan’s Last Love.

Voting Film Academy members and accredited Berlinale professionals will be able to see English subtitled prints of the long-list at a new screening venue in the renovated Zoo-Palast.

The 2014 German Film Awards (aka the Lolas) will take place in a gala ceremony at Berlin’s Tempodrom on May 9 with cash prizes totalling almost €3m.

Home From Home nabs six nominations

Meanwhile, veteran filmmaker Edgar Reitz’s Home From Home – Chronicle of a Vision (Die andere Heimat – Chronik einer Sehnsucht) has received six nominations for the German Film Critics Prize which will be awarded during the Berlinale on Feb 10.

The Critics Prize, which is awarded to German films released theatrically in the previous calendar year, has existed since 1956 and is the only German film prize which is decided exclusively by film critics.

The German Film Critics Association (VDFK) nominated Reitz’s film in the feature film, actress, actor, screenplay, cinematography and editing categories, while Katrin Gebbe’s feature debut Nothing Bad Can Happen (Tore tanzt), which premiered in Cannes last May, picked up four nominations in the feature film, debut, actress and editing categories.

Three nominations apiece were allocated to the feature films Bastard and Finsterworld, and to Marc Bauder’s Locarno-winning documentary Master of the Universe.

The full list of nominations in 12 categories can be founded at the VDFK’s website www.vdfk.de.

An innovation this year also sees the critics’ prizes for short films and experimental films being awarded at the Berlin ceremony.

The nominations in these two categories include Jan Soldat’s Der Unfertige and Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller’s Cut.