For the first time, the Semiramis Award for Best Casting was announced as part of the Black Nights Stars Program, a subprogram of Industry@Tallinn & Baltic Event and Black Nights Film Festival. The 2021 award Semiramis Award for Best Casting was handed out to researcher, writer and BAFTA-winning casting director Lucy Pardee for Rocks by Sarah Gavron (2019).
The casting for Rocks has already earned her a Bafta Award Best Casting 2021, BIFA Best Casting award and Critics’ Circle award. Previously she has acted as a casting director for Dirty God by Sasha Polak (2019) and Perfect 10, by Eva Riley (2019) and American Honey by Andrea Arnold (2016) among many others.
Black Nights Stars, launched by Black Nights Film Festival in 2017, is designed to support young actors from the Baltic Sea region - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Russia - to gain international visibility and promote themselves inside and outside their home territories. The program facilitates connections with casting directors, including the members of ICDN, training and mentoring for their future international careers. In 2021 The Black Nights Stars presented eight talents including Miika Pihlak (Estonia), Sandra Guldberg Kampp (Denmark), Jan Hrynkiewicz (Poland), Doris Tislar (Estonia), Tua El-Fawwal (Germany), Viktoriya Miroshnichenko (Russia), Elias Westerberg (Finland) and Kristina Morta Paškevičiūtė (Lithuania).
The Award for Best Casting was established in 2016 by International Casting Directors Network (ICDN) as the first-ever international prize for the best casting of a feature film, spotlighting the essential role and extraordinary achievements of casting directors around the world in the filmmaking process. As of 2020, this award has been named The Semiramis Award for Best Casting. The International Casting Directors purpose in creating this award is to shine the light on the pivotal role that casting directors play in the creative process of filmmaking.