Alina Serban
Alina Serban is the winner of Best Actress Award at the German Actors Guild Awards 2020 for her leading role in Gipsy Queen, a nominee for Best Actress of the German Film Awards 2020 and the representative of Romania at The Cannes International Film Festival 2018 for her leading role in Alone at My Wedding. The first one in her family to graduate high-school, she succeeded to graduate the Tisch School of the Arts in New York and obtained a master’s from Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, becoming an award-winning actress and the first Roma woman theatre and film director of Romania. For her first leading role in cinema, Serban stars in Marta Bergman’s feature film Alone at My Wedding, which premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2018 and earned her several Best Actress awards. She also stars as a boxer in Huseyin Tabak’s Gipsy Queen, a German-Austrian production. For her performance in Gipsy Queen she won the ‘Best Actress’ award at POFF Black Nights Film Festival Tallinn 2019, the ‘Best Actress’ award at The German Actors Guild Awards was nominated for the German Film Academy Award – LOLA. As a playwright, Serban pioneered Roma feminist political theatre, with three plays to her name by the age of 29, becoming the first Roma woman director to have a play included in the permanent repertoire of a state theatre in Romania in 2018. In 2020, Serban made her debut as a filmmaker with Letter of Forgiveness– the first film about the Roma slavery written and directed from a Roma perspective.