Hirokazu Kore-eda, Cate Blanchett, Minha Kim and Owen Cooper are among the nominees at the Seoul International Drama Awards (SDA), which marks its 20th edition this year.
24 titles and 32 individuals have been nominated in the program and individual categories respectively, beating 276 entries from 50 countries.
Supported by Korea‘s Ministry of Culture, Seoul City and local broadcasters KBS, MBC, SBS, EBS, and CBS, the awards will announce its final winners in September, with the ceremony broadcast on October 2 via SBS TV and the official YouTube channel.
In the Best Director category, Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda (Asura), Denmark’s Bille August (The Count of Montecristo), South Korea’s Won-suk Kim (When Life Gives You Tangerines), Philip Barantini (Adolescence) and Jin-ah Lee (To My Lonely Sister) are among the nominees.
Screenwriters Dan Erickson (Severance S2), Soo Hugh (Pachinko S2), Sang-choon Lim (When Life Gives You Tangerines) and Stephen Graham (Adolescence) are in the race for the best writer honors.
Graham previously won Best Actor at the SDA in 2022 for British title Help.
Cate Blanchett, Japanese actress Rie Miyazawa, as well as Korean actresses Dami Kim, Jung-Young Kim and Minha Kim are all in the running for Best Actress.
For Best Actor, nominees include Adam Scott, Han Chin, Samuel Le Bihan and SDA’s youngest-ever actor nominee Owen Cooper.
In the OTT mini-series competition, there are eight titles in the final list of nominees, including Adolescence, Asura, Pachinko S2 and Korean production Hyper Knife.
Adolescence and Pachinko S2 have received the most number of nominations (four each) across the program and individual competition at the awards.
While the miniseries category is dominated by nominees from global OTT platforms, the TV movie category is stacked with four domestic Korean productions, with three from media conglomerate CJ ENM (Unbalanced Love, The Son and Our Beautiful Summer) and one from broadcaster KBS (To My Lonely Sister).
International nominees include Mexico’s La Puerta Verde and Taiwan’s Though Dead, Still Alive, among others.
In the series category, Korean family drama For Eagle Brothers is among the eight nominees, with the show surpassing a 23% viewership rating domestically.
Two Turkish series, The Good & The Bad and The Nightfall, are among the nominees, with the latter topping Turkiye’s prime-time charts.
Singaporean drama Emerald Hill – The Little Nyonya Story also made the final list of nominees.
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