Director Andreas Dresen is a master of characterisation. Following the singer-songwriter portrait "Gundermann", he has now directed "Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush", a film about a housewife from Bremen who goes through the courts all the way to the US Supreme Court to get her son Murat released from Guantanamo. Fast-paced, multilingual and highly political, the film became a jury and audience favourite at this year's Berlinale, winning bears for its screenplay and Meltem Kaptan's turbulent performance.

Meltem Kaptan

Meltem Kaptan was born in Gütersloh in 1980 as the daughter of Turkish immigrants, studied media studies and graphic design in Marburg and singing and acting in Istanbul and Washington. The result is a mouthpiece in three languages and over four octaves, with which she can easily earn money on the radio from 2007. Just one year later, television came knocking with offers to appear on the comedy shows "Ladies Night", "Bülent Ceylan Show", "Genial daneben" and "Kölner Treff". Meltem Kaptan makes her screen debut as Rabiye Kurnaz.

Over the years, it's easy to forget a few details. It's a good thing that your own Stasi file can help you out. The celebrated author Ludger Fuchs remembers darkly that it wasn't his great writing talent that once gave him access to the artistic scene in Prenzlauer Berg.

And in view of "Stasikomödie", one remembers that it was never the virtuosically woven stories that made Leander Haußmann's GDR memoirs ("Sonnenallee", "NVA") so entertaining, but the quirky revue-like nature of satirical Ostalgie.

Leander Haußmann

Father Edzard an actor, mother Doris a costume designer - providence could not have meant much more theatrically for son Leander, born in Quedlinburg in 1959. He actually studied acting at the Ernst Busch School in Berlin and performed on stage until 1992. He then went on to direct his own films, first at the theatre in Weimar, then as director in Bochum and in 1999 behind the camera of "Sonnenallee", which won him the German Film Award. Another 14 films followed, including "Herr Lehmann" (2003), "NVA" (2006) and "Hotel Lux" (2011).

Eleanor Catton was just 27 years old when she won the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2013 for her 848 pages in "The Luminaries". She scored a real coup in 2015 when the BBC wanted to turn the book into a series and Catton insisted on writing the scripts herself. It's a good thing the British broadcaster agreed, because Catton managed to condense her immense cast of characters and their entanglements in astrology, mythology, crime and love down to the essentials: Suspense and entertainment. The exoticism of New Zealand's 19th century gold-digger milieu rounds off the six-part story congenially.