The films of the International Competition program are eligible for the following awards:
The Official Selection films are eligible for prizes awarded by Independent Juries.
The members of the International Competition Jury of the 64th Thessaloniki International Film Festival are: producer Diana Elbaum; the former director of the Berlin International Film Festival and journalist Dieter Kosslick, and filmmaker and producer Elina Psykou.
The Grand Sponsor of the COSMOTE TV Festival supports the Silver Alexander award with a cash prize of 5,000 euros.
Dieter Kosslick was born in 1948 in South Germany and studied Media Science at Munich University. He has worked as a journalist in Hamburg, where he also served as the ghostwriter of the city and a spokesman for the first women's rights agency in Germany. In 1988, he was appointed president of EFDO, the European Film Distribution Office, the first initiative of the MEDIA Program (Creative Europe) in Brussels. He was the CEO of the public film finance and film support agencies in Hamburg and Nordrhein-Westfalen. He was the director of the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) for 18 years (2001–2019), he has written a book about The Future of Cinema and has taught at the Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg. He is currently organizing an Environmental Film Festival in Potsdam.
Born in Greece in 1977, Elina Psykou studied filmmaking and sociology in Athens. She has directed and written the films The Eternal Return of Antonis Paraskevas (Berlinale Forum 2013) and Son of Sofia (Tribeca 2017, Best International Narrative Feature Award), and currently, she is in the post-production stage of her first documentary, Stray Bodies, and at the development of her third feature Patrimonial Fears and Other Symptoms. In 2009, Elina founded the film production company Jungle Films, and in 2021, she produced the film Pack of Sheep by Dimitris Kanellopoulos. In 2016, together with the film directors Alexis Alexiou and Yannis Veslemes, and the film historian Afroditi Nikolaidou, they formed the team “The Lost Highway of Greek Cinema,” in order to promote the variety and charm of the country’s film production.
Since her beginning in advertising and then film production, Diana Elbaum has produced a vast number of films. Most of them where showcased and awarded in major festivals. Her films cover a large sample of genre and come from all horizons and cultures. Diana set up her first company, Entre Chien et Loup, in 1989. In 2017, Diana Elbaum opened her new company, Beluga Tree, in association with Caviar (War Pony, Sound of Metal, The Rider, Bad Sisters). She produced over 100 features, documentaries and TV series with talents such as Chantal Akerman, Mahamat Saleh Haroun, Paul Verhoeven, Adil El Arbi, and Bilall Fallah Lisa Azuelos, Raoul Peck, Nabil Ben Yadir, Ari Folman, Yuval Adler, Eran Kolirin and Isold Uggadottir, Julie Bertucelli. This year, Diana coproduced un Certain Regard Jury Prize, Kamal Lazraq’s for Les Meutes and the Jury Prize of the 80th Venice Film Festival, Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border. In 2009, she received the European Film Academy award for Best Producer. Diana is deeply committed to training the next generation of producers internationally and joined the expert and group leader team of EAVE in 2007. Since 2020, Diana is also a group leader for Indaba (Africa) from the Realness Institute as well as EAVE’s Access and Elan programs (Canada)
