Family drama Sound of Falling, directed by Mascha Schilinski, and İlker Çatak‘s Berlin Film Festival winner Yellow Letters are leading the nominations for the 2026 German Film Awards, also known as the Lolas, Germany’s equivalent of the Oscars.
Sound of Falling received 11 noms, with Yellow Letters receiving nine. In the best director category, they will compete with Simon Verhoeven’s comedy Ach, diese Lücke, diese entsetzliche Lücke, which received a total of seven noms.
In the best feature film category, those three movies go up against Fatih Akin and Herman Weigel’s Amrum, which got a total of six noms, Anna-Malike Eigl, Thomas Wöbke and Philipp Trauer’s 22 Lengths, which received five, and Felix von Boehm’s The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, which received seven noms.
THR‘s review called Sound of Falling, which depicts four generations of young women inhabiting the same farmhouse in northeast Germany, “a haunting meditation on womanhood and rural strife that heralds the arrival of a bold new talent.”
Competing at Cannes, the second feature from Mascha Schilinski (‘Dark Blue Girl’) .
About Yellow Letters, THR‘s review said: “For his follow-up to the tense and claustrophobic German middle school drama, The Teachers’ Lounge, director Ilker Çatak has attempted something both more ambitious and more mystifying: a tale of authoritarian oppression, artistic strife and family conflict that’s set in contemporary Turkey but was shot entirely in Germany, with no attempts to hide the fact that nothing is taking place where it should.”
Already unveiled on Tuesday as the winner of the biggest box office hit of the year was slapstick comedy Western parody Manitou’s Canoe, directed by and starring Michael “Bully” Herbig.
The German Film Academy unveiled the nominees for the 76th edition of the German Film Awards midday Tuesday. The awards ceremony will take place in Berlin on May 29, hosted by Christian Friedel (The Zone of Interest, The White Lotus, Babylon Berlin) for the second year in a row.
Last year, Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5, the real-life thriller based on the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympics that stars Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro and Leonie Benesch, swept the German honors.
