New feature films by Jaco van Dormael, Dennis Gansel, Chris Kraus and Stefan Ruzowitzky are among 26 projects backed by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg with over $9.3m Euros 6.8m at its last sitting.

The largest single amount - $1.2m (Euros 900,000) - went to Gavin Millar's biopic of Albert Schweitzer.

Jaco van Dormael was allocated $0.7m (Euros 500,000) for his drama Mr Nobody, which is to star Sarah Polley and Jared Leto and is being structured as a German-French-Belgian co-production.

The same amount went to Constantin Film subsidiary Rat Pack Filmproduktion for Napola director Dennis Gansel's gripping drama Die Welle, which is based on Morton Rhue's 1981 novel The Wave, The Classroom Out Of Control.

The film recounts an actual incident which occured in a school history class in Palo Alto, California when a classroom experiment went too far after the history teacher tried to show pupils how the Germans had lived and reacted under the Third Reich.

Development support was given to Four Minutes director Chris Kraus's long cherished project Poll about a 13-year-old girl hiding a partisan soldier on a country estate in Latvia on the eve of the First World War.

Another beneficiary was a new collaboration between Flying Moon Filmproduktion and filmmaker Uli Gaulke after Comrades In Dreams; Projecting Hope is about the aid organisation FilmAid which enables children in a refugee camp in Africa to make films about their own lives.

Other projects supported in this round of funding included Max Faerberboeck's Anonyma, adapted from an anonymous woman's diary of life in Berlin in last months of the war in early 1945, which will be produced by Guenter Rohrbach for Constantin Film as a TV two-parter and feature film for the cinema with Russia's Globus Film; and the two family entertainment films Lilly The Witch, based on the popular children's books by Knister by Stefan Ruzowitzky (The Counterfeiters) and the fantasy classic Robbi, Tobbi Und Das Fliewatuut by fellow Austrian director Wolfgang Murnberger.