WITH more titles than ever before, the German Film Festival is coming to Canberra in early May.

“We’ve never had such a good line-up,” says German-born Bettina Klnski, who’s been working with festival director Elysia Zeccola to come up with a season as tempting to the public as the better-known French and Italian film festivals.

It hasn’t been easy, but they’ve secured a swag of Australian premieres and award-winning movies.

One such is the opening night smash hit film, “A Thousand Lines”, by director Michael Herbig, about the real-life fake news scandal in 2018 involving a disgraced “Der Spiegel” journalist.

“We always look for an entertaining film and I think we’ve succeeded. It’s amusing, but it also tells us a lot about media reality,” Klnski says.

“Sisi & I” is a wild re-interpretation of the “Sisi” myth starring Susanne Wolff and Sandra Hüller, which follows the lady-in-waiting of Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, as they live in an aristocratic commune in Greece.

The festival centrepiece and a favourite of Klnski’s is “The Teachers’ Lounge”, which she describes as “almost a thriller”. Leonie Benesch plays Carla, an idealistic teacher who decides to investigate a series of thefts at her new school, only to encounter outraged parents, opinionated colleagues and aggressive students.

Closing night film is “Over & Out”, a clever comedy by director Julia Becker. 

As with the other festivals in the past year or so, they are focusing on female directors – and this one, depicting a chaotic road trip, is billed as “a female-led and directed drama”, since the director also plays one of the protagonists. 

Briefly, four girlfriends and self-proclaimed “muscleteers” swore to each other as teenagers that they would celebrate their weddings together. Twenty six years later they come to do so – in Italy —and the fun begins.

Like its French counterpart, the German Film Festival pays homage to the fact that there are other countries where the German language is spoken, so there are inclusions from Austria and Switzerland.

Margarethe von Trotta has directed a biopic for the literati in “Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert”, a look at Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s turbulent romance with Swiss playwright Max Frisch.

From Switzerland comes “And Tomorrow We Will Be Dead”, a true story from 2011 when two Swiss citizens were kidnapped and held hostage by the Taliban.

Klnski is from East Germany, so the movie closest to her heart is Eva Weber’s documentary “Merkel”, the story of how a woman, a scientist, and an East German became one of the most powerful politicians in the world.

The German Film Festival, Palace Electric, May 2- 24.