The winner of the Golden Chair for Best Norwegian Short Film is awarded NOK 50.000 presented by Agder County. The film qualifies for consideration to an Oscar® nomination for Best Short Film, Live Action or Animated, provided it meets all requirements set by The Academy® for nominated films.
Anna Henckel-Donnersmarck is the curator and head of Berlinale Shorts, the competition for short films at the Berlinale. Born in Frankfurt/Main in 1973 and grew up in Indonesia, Japan, England and Bavaria, she studied at Camberwell College of Art and Design in London and received her degree from Film Academy Baden-Württemberg/Ludwigsburg, focusing on animation and documentary filmmaking. From 2007 to 2019, she served as a member of the selection committee for Berlinale Shorts. Her primary focus is on the short film format.
She works with the moving image in various ways. For 20 years, she has been active as a programmer (Filmwinter Stuttgart, Kasseler Dokfest, ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, etc), moderator (Pictoplasma, Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film, etc), and jury member (Baltic Pitch Forum, Curtocircuito Spain, Deutscher Kurzfilmpreis, Dokufest Kosovo, Fantoche Switzerland, FIRST China, Hamburg Kurzfilm Festival, MIFF India, Nordisk Panorama, OFF Denmark, Regard Canada, Szpilman Award, Tehran International Short Film Festival, Tel Aviv Student Film Festival, VIS Austria, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, etc).
In addition, she conceives and realises video installations for exhibitions, stage works and concerts, for example for Bauhaus Archive Berlin, Kunsthalle Karlsruhe @ ZKM, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Hygiene Museum Dresden, GRIMMWELT Kassel, Humboldt Lab, Constanza Macras/DorkyPark, Mathilde Monnier, Schauspiel Köln, The Wooster Group NYC, the Berlin Philharmoniker and opera houses in Berlin, Frankfurt and Zürich.
She teaches film theory and video practice at various art and film schools.
Torill Kove is an award-winning Norwegian-Canadian filmmaker, animator and illustrator. Born in Norway, she has lived in Montreal since 1982. Three of her films have been nominated for Academy Awards®, with The Danish Poet, narrated by Liv Ullmann, winning the coveted golden statue in 2007.
Kove’s films are known for her expressive designs and playful and poignant autobiographical themes. Her work frequently deals with the challenges of family and parenting, while lightly exploring questions around memory, history and birth. Kove made her directorial debut in 1999 with My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts, a story set in Oslo during WW2 and inspired by the life of her grandmother. Following The Danish Poet, a humorous take on the random nature of existence, Kove returned with Me and My Moulton (2014), about a middle child’s search for normalcy in the face of her loving but eccentric parents. Threads (2017) is a journey of attachment between a parent and her child. With her most recent film, Maybe Elephants (2024), Kove tells a story based on childhood memories, which may or may not be accurate, about a family’s emotional bonds and separation.
Her last four films were all co-produced by the Norwegian animation studio Mikrofilm. In 2013, Kove directed the animated feature Hocus Pokus Alfie Atkins. She has also illustrated numerous children’s books.
Thomas Robsahm is a producer, director, musician and former actor. He has worked in most positions in film and television since he first stood in front of the camera as an 8-year-old in 1972. After over a decade working for Wam & Vennerød in the ‘80s, he debuted as a feature film director and producer with the feature film Black Panthers in 1992.
Since then, he has directed both feature films such as the Amanda winner S.O.S. (1999) and The Greatest Thing (2001), as well as documentaries such as the Amanda winner Modern Slavery (2009), Punx (2015) and a-ha The Movie (2021).
He has produced films for a wide range of directors, such as Joachim Trier, Margreth Olin, Maria Sødahl, Aurora Gossé, Emil Trier, Lilja Ingolfsdottir, Solveig Melkeraaen, Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, Gunhild Asting, Ole Jakob Andersen and others.
The films have been invited to festivals such as Cannes, Berlin, Toronto, Sundance, Karlovy Vary, Tribeca, London, New York, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Gothenburg, IDFA Amsterdam, CPH:DOX and others.
Robsahm has won eight Amanda Awards, two as a director and six as producer, including two People’s Amandas. He has also won the Gullruten Award four times for television productions and documentaries.
Other awards include the Nordic Council Film Prize for Joachim Trier’s Louder Than Bombs, which was in competition at Cannes in 2015. He is a two-time nominee for the Kanon Award for best producer and three-time nominee for the Nordic Council Film Prize.
In 2021 he received the Aamot statuette for outstanding contributions in Norwegian film. He is also a member of the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as one of only three Norwegian producers.
Irene Soriano is a Los Angeles–based film curator, festival programmer, and writer who programs short films for the Sundance Film Festival and has curated film programs for the Outfest Fusion QTBIPOC Film Festival, the Echo Park Film Center, the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS), I See You Microcinema and the Pratt Institute. She was the first Film Independent/Project Involve Fellow to initiate a Film Programming Industry Track in 2003 and has since contributed her expertise to various juries, including the International Narrative Shorts Award for Outfest LA, the Animation Shorts Award for the Palm Springs International Shortfest, the Social Change Jury for USC School of Cinematic Arts’ First Look 2025, and the Music Documentary Feature Jury for the Nashville Film Festival.
Irene speaks and moderates panels at film events, including PBS, Black Film Space, NYU’s All Asian Arts Alliance, FestForums, and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. She curated The Filipinx Edition: Queer and Trans Visions from Women and Non-Binary Artists for OUTMUSEUM, Outfest’s LGBTQ+ arts and virtual media platform, and moderated a DOC Leipzig podcast on equity in film programming with the Programmers of Colour Collective. Central to Irene’s organizing mission in the film space are the principles of building community, fostering collaborations, and providing sustainable support for the storytelling projects she champions.
Marte Vold graduated from the Nordland College of Art and Film in 2001, the Norwegian Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo in 2005, and from the Norwegian Film School as a cinematographer in 2008.
Since then, she has worked in the field as both a cinematographer and director. She produced and directed the short film Totem, which was shown at New Directors New Films at MoMa, as well as the documentary film Letter, co-directed with South Korean Jero Yun. She has worked on performing arts projects, and has been responsible for video on several productions at the National Theatre and the Norwegian Theatre.
As a cinematographer, in recent years she has worked on the feature films Wild Relatives by Jumana Manna, Han by Guro Brusgaard, Tyngde by Thomas Østbye, and Voice by Ane Hjort Guttu. Vold lives and works primarily in Oslo.
Marie Therese Guirgis
er en filmprodusent og produksjonssjef som har arbeidet med både fiksjons- og dokumentarfilm. Nylige produksjoner hun har vært med på inkluderer MLK/FBI av Sam Pollard, Oscar-vinneren Summer Of Soul av Ahmir «Questlove» Thompson, The Meaning of Hitler av Petra Epperlein og Mike Tucker, Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami, samt The Brink av Alison Klayman. Giurgis har også produsert spillefilmene Keep the Lights On av Ira Sachs og The Loneliest Planet av Julia Loktev.
Hun er for tiden produksjonsdirektør i Play/Action Pictures, et selskap hun etablerte med Jeffrey Lurie i 2019. Før hun begynte med filmproduksjon hadde hun mange års erfaring fra filmdistribusjon.
Other juries and awards
The Norwegian Short Film Festival / kortfilm@kortfilmfestivalen.no
Kortfilmfestivalen i Grimstad
kortfilm@kortfilmfestivalen.no