Honoured: When We Leave star Sibel Kekilli won the best actress award from the German Film Academy and at the Tribeca Film Festival. — File Photo

HA NOI — The German Film Festival will travel to the coastal city of Nha Trang for the first time this year, building on the overwhelming success of the festival in 2010 and 2011, festival organisers announced.

The event drew nearly 30,000 film fans last year, they said.

This year's festival, featuring a slate of 10 prize-winning films, will kick off in Ha Noi on Thursday before proceeding to the northern port city of Hai Phong and the central cities of Hue, Da Nang, and Nha Trang, finally ending up in HCM City with screenings to begin on September 28.

The film Promising the Moon has been selected to open the festival in each city. The family epic, directed by Hans Steinbichler, was honoured at the Locarno International Film Festival last year and also won the Bavarian Film Award.

Depicting the distant relationship between a mother and daughter, the movie showed Germany past and present and featured veteran director Juliane Koehler in the principle role as the mother, said the director of the Goethe Institute in Ha Noi, Almuth Meyer-Zollitsch.

The film When We Leave was expected to be a highlight of the festival. The debut of director Feo-Aladag was the German candidate for the 2011 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It has won several international cinema awards last, including best actress titles for German-Turk actress Sibel Kekilli at the Tribeca Film Festival and from the German Film Academy.

Director Simon Verhoeven's comedy Men in the City 2 was another winner at the Bavarian Film Awards last year, while Beats Being Dead is the first part of the Three Lives trilogy in which directors Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhausler take turns telling the story of a crime from three different perspectives.

The Crocodiles 3 and Lessons of a Dream are suitable for family audiences. The Crocodiles series about the adventures of a group of friends is based on Max von Grun's children's book, while Lessons, the debut of director Sebastian Grobler, is based on a true story and explores the historical events that led to the introduction of football in Germany.

During the festival, audiences can enter a sweepstakes with prizes offered by the Goethe Institute by taking quizzes online to answer questions about the films at www.goethe.de.

Free tickets can be picked up at the Goethe Institute in Ha Noi and HCM City, at Hai Phong's Workers Cinema, at the Centre for Culture and Information and the Lieu Quan Buddhist Cultural Centre in Hue, at the Le Do Theatre and the German House in Da Nang, and at Nha Trang's Khanh Hoa Cinema. — VNS