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Criterion releases actor turned director Bernhard Wicki’s feature film debut The Bridge for the very first time on Region 1. Though he directed a mid-length film the year before, Why Are They Against Us?, it would be his next project, arriving in 1959, that would come to be known as the first anti-war film to come out of Germany, as well as the nation’s first post-war film to reach international recognition and critical acclaim. It would go on to win the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film in the Us, and it secured an Academy Award Nomination in the same category (losing out to Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus).

The title paved the way for a short-lived English language career for Wicki, but more importantly, stood as the platform upon which the burgeoning New German Cinema auteurs would proliferate, precipitating Volker Schlondorff’s own 1966 debut, Young Torless, a much darker...

Iceland’s Oscar submission takes top prize in Lübeck; Edward Snowden gives video introduction to Citizenfour at Dok Leipzig; arson attack hits Lgbt screening in Kyiv.

Baldvin Baldvin Zophoníasson’s Life In A Fishbowl was the big winner at this year’s Nordic Film Days in Lübeck, taking home the Ndr Film Prize, worth $15,655 (€12,500)

Lead actor Thorsteinn Bachmann accepted the award in person from the five-person jury, which said it was “a touching and hopeful film about seemingly hopeless situations”.

The co-production between Iceland, Finland, Sweden and the Czech Republic is Iceland’s submission for the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar and is being handled internationally by Films Boutique.

Special mentions were also given to Hisham Zaman’s Letter To The King (Norway) and J-p Valkeapää’s They Have Escaped (Finland) by the jury comprising actors Victoria Trauttmansdorff and Niklas Osterloh, producer Christoph Thoke, Ndr commissioning editor Diana Schulte-Kellinghaus and Finnish film-maker Kirsi Marie Liimatainen.

Festival-goers voted for...