Casting director Amy Rowan, winner of this year’s IFTA Award for Casting, travels to the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival as one of six nominees from around the world shortlisted for the 2026 Semiramis Award for excellence in casting.
Rowan is nominated for her work on Brendan Canty’s Christy, one of the standout Irish films of the year. The Semiramis nominees and winner are chosen by the members of the International Network of Casting Directors, with the winner to be announced and the award presented on Wednesday, 8 July.
It is Rowan’s second nomination for the award, having previously been shortlisted in 2016 for Simon Fitzmaurice’s My Name Is Emily.
“I am honoured to be nominated for this award for the second time and to represent Ireland at Karlovy Vary alongside the other very talented nominees from around the world,” Rowan said. “Christy is pure Cork and, at the same time, universal, and I am delighted to be part of this festival, bringing the film to the attention of a wider audience of industry and cinéastes.”
A breakout year for Christy
The nomination caps a remarkable run for Christy, the debut feature from Cork director Brendan Canty. Expanded from his 2019 short of the same name and written by Alan O’Gorman from a story by O’Gorman and Canty, the film had its world premiere at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2025, opening the festival’s youth-oriented Generation 14plus programme and going on to claim the section’s top prize.
Set on the working-class north side of Cork, Christy follows a 17-year-old (Danny Power, who also led Canty’s original short) who is turned out of his foster home and lands on the doorstep of his estranged older brother Shane (Diarmuid Noyes). What Shane intends as a temporary arrangement becomes something more as Christy begins to find his feet, forge friendships and reconnect with the community and family history his brother would rather he left behind. Warm, noisy and full of heart, the film has been embraced by critics and audiences alike as a joyful, clear-eyed portrait of a young man searching for belonging.
That reception carried through awards season. Christy led the field at the 2026 IFTA Awards with 14 nominations, converting four of them into wins — Best Film, Director for Canty, Editing for Allyn Quigley, and Casting for Rowan. Rowan’s eye for fresh, authentic faces, anchoring the ensemble around a largely non-professional local cast, was central to the film’s grounded, lived-in feel, and it is that work now recognised on the international stage at Karlovy Vary.