The International Casting Directors Association (ICDA) presented the Semiramis Award for Best Casting on Saturday, November 1st, at the Tonia Marketaki Theatre. This honorary award recognizes the significant contribution of casting directors and the decisive role they play in shaping the genre of a film, the performances and the audience's relationship with the storytelling. Tania Grunwald and Karin Jagd received the award for the film The Girl with the Needle by Magnus von Horn, followed by the screening of the film The Thing with Feathers by Dylan Southern.
In collaboration with the ICDA, TIFF hosts a series of events as part of its 66th edition. In addition to the Semiramis Award for Best Casting, four distinguished guests delivered masterclasses on the unseen art of casting in the modern era, and a closed workshop will be held for actors selected from the wider region. The above activities are carried out with the support of ICDA’s long-standing and valuable partners, the Filmmakers Europe platform and the internationally renowned casting studio Spotlight.
Elise Jalladeau, the Festival’s General Director, was the first to take the floor. "Dear friends, honorable members of the International Association of Casting Directors, welcome to Thessaloniki. It is a great honour to welcome you here for the presentation of the Semiramis Award. This is a very important event, a celebration of the art and mastery of casting. Casting is the invisible bridge that unites storytelling and acting. Casting directors are the ones who choose actors through a variety of processes, constituting in a way the first audience for each film. They are the ones recognizing the spark, the truth and the chemistry that can breathe life into each character within each film," she mentioned. Then, she added: “For the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, the value of collaboration is of great importance. This is the way in which cinema can truly flourish, when many talents join forces to create something remarkable and grand. The ICDA is the embodiment of this spirit and those values. I want to congratulate you on your films, to thank you all for your participation and for helping to transform these stories into an unforgettable human experience.”
At that point, Lana Venkeer, the president of the International Casting Directors Association, took the stage: “First of all, I want to thank the Festival and all its people for this warm welcome. We have never had the chance to be so warmly welcomed before and we are truly grateful. I would like to thank our Board of Directors and its executive member, Sofia Dimopoulou, for this collaboration. I would also like to thank our partners, Filmmakers Europe and Spotlight, who have supported us all this time.” Then, Lana Venkeer pointed out: “I would also like to take a moment to honor someone very dear to us, who unfortunately is not with us tonight: Simone Ber. A very dear collaborator, a member of the European Film Academy and of our association. She was the casting director for Tim Fehlbaum's film The Fifth of September, and she sadly passed away in January 2023. She was the soul of that film. I also want to thank her collaborator, Alexandra Montag, who is with us today and who decided that she could not leave Simone's legacy unfinished. Thus, she formed an international team in her name, determined to bring the work she had started to completion. Almost all the members of that team are here today”.
Lana Venkeer then thanked the European Film Academy and the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who decided to institute awards for casting directors from 2026 onwards: "We fought hard for this. Finally, we succeeded and we are very grateful for this recognition. The ICDA introduced the Semiramis Award in 2016, precisely because, until then, there had been no form of international recognition for casting directors", she noted.
Referring to the award given by the ICDA, Lana Venkeer added: "Each country selects and nominates a domestically produced film which has been previously assessed as the most complete casting choice. A committee then ends up in the five final candidate films and selects one more, which can be produced in any country. Therefore, the final number of candidate films is six."
This year's nominations:
Τhe Girl with Needle - Tanja Grunwald, Karin Jagd
Vermiglio - Maurilio Mangano, Stefania Rodà
The New Year That Never Came - Viorica Capdefier
Heldin - Corinna Glaus
September 5 - Simone Bär, Nancy Foy, Lucinda Syson
L'étranger - Hossein Sabir
The award was given to the film The Girl with the Needle.
The award winners, Tania Grunwald and Karin Jagd, said: "It's really wonderful what's happening. Thank you very much for the award. We want to thank all the contributors, the production and the director of the film, Magnus von Horn. We are very happy about this distinction, although it is very difficult to define what exactly our work consists of. It's difficult for us too sometimes, but we will keep fighting. Thank you very much!"
This was followed by the screening of the film The Thing with Feathers by Dylan Southern.
