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Casting director An Dorthe Braker, known as “casting queen” of German cinema, will receive an honorary German Film Award for outstanding contributions to German cinema, the German film academy announced Monday.

Braker was a pioneer in Germany, bringing a U.S.-style casting approach to the German film industry in the early 1990s, before the profession was formally recognized in Germany. Through her work on such features as Run Lola Run, Downfall and Nowhere in Africa, she has elevated repeated generations of German talent to the international stage.

“Many biographies of actors would not have been written without her,” said German Film Academy president Alexandra Maria Lara, whose own breakthrough came in the Oscar-nominated Downfall. “With her strong, clear attitude, she has had a strong influence on the profession of casting directors and has done great things for German film.”

Braker’s many credits include the Oscar-nominated features The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) and Schtonk!

The Oldenburg International Film Festival, often dubbed Germany’s Sundance, will this year pay tribute to one of the country’s most revered filmmakers, Dominik Graf, with a special retrospective.

The 31st edition of the festival, running from Sept. 11 to 15, will spotlight Graf’s prolific career, as one of Germany’s few masters in genre filmmaking.

Graf, 71, began his career in the 1970s, inspired by American indie directors like Sam Fuller and Robert Aldrich and French auteurs such as Jean-Pierre Melville, using arthouse techniques and storytelling for crime, comedy and other genre tales.

The festival’s retrospective will showcase six of Graf’s most influential films, including thrillers Die Katze (1988) and Die Sieger (1995/2018 director’s cut), both of which have become genre-defining in German cinema and exemplify Graf’s distinctive, taut, economical approach to plot and character.

Alongside his feature film work, Graf is credited with setting new standards for...

Germany is on its postwar sickbed, and perched on the edge of self-destruction, in Dominik Graf’s epically sized yet intimately scaled, cracked picture of Weimar Berlin after WWI, and with omens of the next one creeping in. A 178-minute bildungsroman in the true sense, “Fabian – Going to the Dogs,” shot with primarily handheld digital camera and in the boxed-in Academy ratio, While perhaps padding its running time too robustly with strange and often even grotesque side characters, the movie ultimately falls squarely on Tom Schilling’s shoulders, the idealist of the title who chooses falling in love over ambition.

At 32 years old, Jakob Fabian is a 32-year-old war veteran back in the city and rattled by Ptsd, which is somewhat keeping his literary aspirations at bay as he works by day as an ad man for a cigarette company. Based on Erich Kästner’s novel of the same name,...