Locarno competition entry The Longing (Das Verlangen) (pictured) by Iain Dilthey, which has its international premiere in the official competition here on Thursday 8th August, is among five feature-length films by German film school graduates nominated for this year's FIRST STEPS Awards which will be announced in Berlin on August 26.

The other graduation features competing for the Euros 25,000 award are Anne Wild's My First Miracle (Mein Erstes Wunder), which will premiere in official competition at Montreal's World Film Festival later this month; and three films from Berlin's German Film & Television Academy: Erste Ehe by Isabelle Stever, Nicht Fisch, Nicht Fleisch by Matthias Keilich, and Chris Kraus' Scherbentanz - which won the Best Screenplay prize at the Munich Filmfest in July and has since been picked up for German theatrical distribution by Movienet..

The jury of actresses Suzanne von Borsody and Barbara Rudnik, media journalist Michael Hanfeld, and directors Michael Gutmann and Margarethe von Trotta selected 15 titles from 124 submissions for the categories of "Short films to 25 minutes", "Fiction films to 60 minutes" and "Feature-length films", which offer Euros 10,000, Euros 15,000 and Euros 25,000 prize-money, respectively.