News

The 16-part TVseries Babylon Berlin is based on Volker Kutscher’s bestselling crime thrillers.

Volker Bruch and Liv Lisa Fries are to star in lead roles for Babylon Berlin, the most ambitious German TV production to date, based on Volker Kutscher’s internationally bestselling historical crime thrillers set in the Berlin of the Roaring Twenties.

Cast as the police inspector Gereon Rath, Bruch is already known for appearances in the internationally successful German TV series Generation War as well as such feature films The Reader, Young Goethe and Tour De Force, while Fries - as the shorthand typist Charlotte - has credits including The Wave, Boy 7 and Und Morgen Mittag Bin Ich Tot.

Tom Tykwer is serving as showrunner for the high-end 16-part series which he will direct with co-authors Hendrik Handloegten and Achim von Boerries.

Speaking on the eve of this year’s Berlinale, Tykwer revealed that this would be the first time he had...

New films by Dietrich Brüggemann, Alex Ranisch and Philip Koch are to be judged by Munich Film Festival’s first ever Fipresci jury in its New German Cinema sidebar at this year’s forthcoming edition (June 25 - July 4).

Swiss film critic Beat Glur, Berlin-based, New Zealand-born Carmen Gray, and Israel’s Nachum Mochiach will choose their winner from 18 world premieres - 13 fiction feature films and five documentaries - including two titles which will then have their international premieres in Karlovy Vary: Brüggemann’s Heil, a politically incorrect satire on German neo-Nazis, and Kosovo-born Visar Morina’s feature debut Babai, which will be released in Germany by missingFilms .

The line-up also includes:

Özgur Yildirim’s dystopian sci-fi thriller Boy 7, starring David Kross and Emilia Schüle, based on the bestselling Dutch book by Mirjam Mous, to be distributed in Germany by Koch Media;

Florian Cossen and Elena von Saucken’s Canada-set black indie comedy Coconut Hero, which is being...