Matthias Glasner’s Dying leads the Lolas, the German Film Awards, with nine nominations, including for best feature film, director, screenplay, and score.
Additionally, Lars Eidinger has been nominated as best actor and Corinna Harfouch as best actress; Robert Gwisdek and Hans-Uwe Bauer have both been nominated for best supporting actor.
The family drama premiered in competition at the Berlinale last month and will be released in Germany by Wild Bunch on April 25.
The Lolas will take place at a ceremony in Berlin on May 3.
Timm Kröger’s second feature The Universal Theory, which premiered in Venice’s Horizons section last September, received the six nominations, including for best film, director, visual effects and production design.
The other four films in the running to win one of the three Lola statuettes - Gold, Silver, and Bronze - in the top category of best feature film are the historical dramas The Fox by Adrian Goiginger and A Whole Life by Hans Steinbichler, Milena Aboyan’s coming of age film Elaha and Ayse Polat’s mystery thriller In The Blind Spot
Each of these six nominated productions received a cash premium of €250,000 from the State Ministry for Culture and Media (BKM) to be invested by the producers in a future film project.
The three documentaries nominated in the best documentary category - Wim Wenders’ Anselm, Steffi Niederzoll’s Seven Winters in Tehran and co-directors Fabiana Fragale, Kilian Kuhlendahl and Jens Mühlhoff’s Vergiss Meyn Nicht - have each been awarded premiums of €100,000.
In the best children’s film category, two nomination premiums of €125,000 each were awarded to Curious Tobi and The Treasure Hunt to the Flying Rivers by the late Johannes Honsell, which has been seen by over 1.2m cinema-goers and taken over € 8.6m at German cinemas since its release last autumn, and Soleen Yusef’s Winners which premiered in the Berlinale’s 14plus section last month and will be released by DCM in Germany on 11 April.
In total, € 2.1m was awarded by BKM to all of the nominees in the three best film categories.
Diverse filmmakers
This year’s line-up of nominations reflected the increasingly diverse composition of the German cinema with two nominations apiece going to the Yazudi Kurd filmmaker Milena Aboyan for her debut feature Elaha (best feature film, actress), Turkish-German writer-director Ayse Polat for In The Blind Spot (best feature film, screenplay) and to Iranian-born Behrooz Karamizade for his debut Empty Nets (best sound, film score) which had its international premiere at last year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
The nominations were announced in a new live format on the ARD Mediathek and the public broadcaster’s midday magazine programme Mittagsmagazin by Claudia Roth, state minister for culture and media. She revealed veteran actress Hanna Schygulla, whose credits include Fassbinder classics The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lili Marleen, will be the recipient of this year’s Honorary Lola for her services to German cinema.
The final winners of the Lola statuettes will now be voted upon by the members of the German Film Academy until April 30 before the awards ceremony in Berlin on May 3.
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