No Rest for the Wicked, Kasper Kalle’s folk-horror love story set on the Faroe Islands in the 19th century, has won the NDR Film Prize at the 68th Nordic Film Days Lübeck. The award, worth €12,500 ($14,000) and funded by the German public broadcaster NDR, is the festival’s biggest. It was presented on Saturday 7 November at the Theater Lübeck, according to the festival’s awards announcement. The festival handed out 11 prizes worth €70,000 ($78,000) in all, and says the pot grew this year.
The night belonged as much to Sámi cinema as to the Danish winner. Amanda Kernell’s Brace Your Heart (Garrat du váimmu – Gör hjärtat hårt), the story of a 20-year-old who takes over her late father’s reindeer herd, won two prizes: the €7,500 Audience Award and the €5,000 INTERFILM Church Prize. Elle Sofe Sara’s debut feature Árru took the €5,000 Baltic Film Prize for a Nordic Feature, and Håvard Bustnes’s Let Our Mountains Live (La fjella leve) won the €5,000 documentary prize. The festival’s own headline on the results was that three Sámi films had carried the competition. By FilmBunch’s count, those three titles took €22,500, or 32% of the money on offer, and Brace Your Heart’s two awards together matched the top prize.
Key facts
- Festival: 68th Nordic Film Days Lübeck (Nordische Filmtage Lübeck), Germany, 4–8 November 2026; awards presented 7 November
- NDR Film Prize, €12,500 ($14,000): No Rest for the Wicked (Kasper Kalle; Denmark, Faroe Islands, Iceland)
- Double winner: Brace Your Heart (Amanda Kernell; Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Bulgaria), Audience Award and INTERFILM Church Prize, €12,500 combined
- 11 juried and audience prizes worth €70,000 ($78,000); three Sámi titles took €22,500 of it
- The festival showed 186 films and held 243 public events; it was managing director Susanne Kasimir’s last edition
Kalle’s film follows Baldur, a young Faroese fisherman, who is pulled out of the fog by Helge, a Danish whaler passing through, and falls in love with him in a strictly religious village. When Helge drowns, the romance turns into a vampire story. Egor Venned plays Baldur and Pilou Asbæk plays Helge; Rasmus Birch and Kalle adapted the screenplay from “Manor”, a short story by the 19th-century German writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Lars Bredo Rahbek produced for SF Studios Denmark, and Salzgeber is the German distributor.
The NDR jury called it a story of “Romeo and Romeo”, and made a point of where it was being honoured. Lübeck, it noted, is where Nosferatu was brought to life, and the jury said it was proud to reward a film that “brings the vampires back to the city”. F. W. Murnau shot parts of his 1922 film in Lübeck. The jury gave a special mention to Ulya (Uļa), by the Latvian director Viesturs Kairišs. The Estonian director Anna Hints, whose Smoke Sauna Sisterhood won a directing award at Sundance, presented the prize.
Kernell, a Swedish Sámi director best known for Sami Blood (2016), cast Brace Your Heart with non-professional actors who work as herders, according to the festival’s programme note. The film is a Nordisk Film production, with TrustNordisk handling world sales. Audience voters chose it, and the INTERFILM church jury said its protagonist is “neither victim nor heroine. She is a survivor.” The Sámi thread ran through the whole week: on opening night, 4 November, the festival gave its unpaid honorary award to Anne Lajla Utsi, head of the International Sámi Film Institute.
The documentary jury, from the services union ver.di’s Lübeck/South-East Holstein district, said Let Our Mountains Live shows “that being right does not always mean getting justice; sometimes you do not even get an apology”, and praised its portrait of young people’s protest in the Sámi struggle to protect their livelihood. Danish director Mads Mengel’s The Guest (Gæsten) won the €7,500 award for best first feature; the actor Jürgen Vogel presented it, and Mengel accepted by video message.
The winners
The complete list, as published by the festival:
NDR Film Prize, €12,500 (Norddeutscher Rundfunk): No Rest for the Wicked (Eine Matrosengeschichte), Kasper Kalle (Denmark, Faroe Islands, Iceland)
NDR Film Prize special mention: Ulya (Uļa), Viesturs Kairišs (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland)
Prize of the Friends of the Nordic Film Days for Best Debut Feature, €7,500: The Guest (Gæsten), Mads Mengel (Denmark)
Audience Award, €7,500 (Die Gemeinnützige): Brace Your Heart (Garrat du váimmu – Gör hjärtat hårt), Amanda Kernell (Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Bulgaria)
INTERFILM Church Prize, €5,000 (Evangelical Lutheran Church District of Lübeck-Lauenburg): Brace Your Heart, Amanda Kernell
Baltic Film Prize for a Nordic Feature, €5,000 (Baltic Films): Árru, Elle Sofe Sara (Norway, Sweden, Finland)
Documentary Prize, €5,000 (ver.di Lübeck/South-East Holstein): Let Our Mountains Live (La fjella leve), Håvard Bustnes (Norway, Finland)
CineStar Prize, €5,000 (CineStar Group): The B-side of the Landscape (Auf der Rückseite der Landschaft), Philipp Hartmann (Germany)
CineStar Prize special mention: Approved Numbers (Hinterlegte Nummern), Farina Mietchen (Germany)
Children’s and Youth Film Prize, €7,500 (Gemeinnützige Sparkassenstiftung zu Lübeck): Skiff, Cecilia Verheyden (Belgium, Sweden, Netherlands)
Children’s Jury Prize, €5,000 (sponsored by SUPERKUNSTFESTIVAL): The Mystery Package (Mysteriepakken), Silje Evensmo Jacobsen (Norway)
Youth Jury Prize, €5,000 (sponsored by Theater Lübeck): Morten, Ivan Pavljutškov (Estonia, Lithuania)
Prize for Best Nordic and Baltic Short Film, €5,000 (Stadtwerke Lübeck): The End, Niki Lindroth von Bahr (Sweden, France, Denmark)
Short film special mention: Class Photo (Klasės nuotrauka), Arnas Balčiūnas (Lithuania)
Honorary Award (unpaid), presented 4 November: Anne Lajla Utsi, International Sámi Film Institute
The 11 cash prizes listed come to €70,000, the total the festival gives. At the opening, the festival also named the three recipients of the fourth Lübeck screenwriting grant: Johanna Domke, Arne Körner and Rafael Stachowiak. Dollar figures in this article use the European Central Bank’s reference rate of 6 November, $1.1165 to the euro.
Our reading
Lübeck is less a launch pad than a doorway. It is where German buyers, broadcasters and distributors see the year’s Nordic and Baltic films in one place, and its prizes tend to follow titles that already have a road. No Rest for the Wicked arrives with a German distributor in place, which makes the NDR prize useful marketing more than a discovery.
The Sámi results are the more telling part of the list. Three of the 11 prizes, and nearly a third of the cash, went to Sámi stories in a year when the festival also honoured the head of the International Sámi Film Institute. The festival framed it as a Sámi year itself, and the prize list bears that out. The next test is commercial: whether Brace Your Heart and Árru find German and wider European release on the back of it.
The festival now changes hands. The city of Lübeck thanked Kasimir on stage for seven years in the job; Stefan Vochezer takes over as managing director on 1 May 2027 and will then run the festival with Hanna Reifgerst, who is already artistic director. More than half the programme, including all the series, is streaming online until 15 November.
Related: FilmFestival Cottbus’s winners; Tallinn Black Nights at 30 and its Baltic focus; Camerimage’s opening.
Sources
- Nordische Filmtage Lübeck, “Die Preise sind vergeben!” awards release with the full list of prizes, 8 November 2026 (German)
- Nordische Filmtage Lübeck, jury statements 2026 (German)
- Nordische Filmtage Lübeck, film pages (No Rest for the Wicked; Brace Your Heart)
- Nordische Filmtage Lübeck, press photos page (management)
- NDR, “Queere Vampirgeschichte gewinnt NDR Filmpreis”, 8 November 2026 (German)
- Rushprint, “Norske filmer prisvinnere i Lübeck”, 8 November 2026 (Norwegian)
- European Central Bank, euro reference rate for the US dollar, 6 November 2026