Christian Petzold's The State I Am In (Die Innere Sicherheit) and Tom Tykwer's The Princess And The Warrior (Der Krieger Und Die Kaiserin) came away with four nominations each for this year's German Film Awards.

Who will end up winning the statuettes - to be known as Lola following a vote by viewers of private TV station ProSieben and readers of the TV and radio listings magazine TV Spielfilm - will be revealed on June 22nd in the historical German State Opera House on Berlin's Unter den Linden.

But even before those prizes are handed out, all of the main contenders are already assured of winning something: Germany's new State Minister for Culture Julian Nida-Ruemelin is paying out $224,000 (DM 500,000) to each of the Best Feature Film nominees and $89,500 (DM 200,000) to all of those up for Best Documentary.

Apart from Petzold and Tykwer, Best Feature Film nominations went to Esther Gronenborn's alaska.de, Hans-Christian Schmid's Crazy, Oliver Hirschbiegel's Das Experiment and Miguel Alexandre's Gran Paradiso. Competing for Best Documentary honours are Uli Gaulke's Havanna Mi Amor and Hans-Erich Viet's Milk And Honey From Rotfront. In addition, Franziska Buch's Emil Und Die Detektive and Uli Edel's The Little Vampire were selected as the finalists in the Best Children's and Young People's Film categories.

Up for Best Actress are Julia Hummer (The State I Am In), Franka Potente (The Princess And The Warrior) and Katrin Sass (Michael Klier's Heidi M). The Best Actor award will be fought out between Moritz Bleibtreu (for both Das Experiment and Fatih Akin's Im Juli), Marek Harloff (Vanessa Jopp's Vergiss Amerika) and Robert Stadlober (Crazy).