Nia Bowers
German-Polish actress Silvana Damm has moved from leading roles in German film and television to a Netflix series and an internationally cast feature, building an international career defined by emotionally complex characters and original storytelling.
The acting awards came first. Best Actress at Frankfurt. Best Actress at Mannheim. A nomination at Karlsruhe, all three for the same performance, her lead in the short film Staudamm. Three juries, one role, and one kind of woman underneath it: someone carrying a weight she has no intention of setting down.
The Girl with the Scar
That is the part Silvana Damm keeps coming back to, on the side of the camera where she is the one being watched. German television has leaned on her for years. She has carried ZDF films like Rosamunde Pilcher and Inga Lindström, guested on ARD, ZDF and MDR, and lately turned up as a woman named Svetlana in the Netflix series Bodies, directed by Marco Kreuzpaintner.
What she wants from a role travels well. It barely changes from one country to the next.
“I’ve always been interested in female characters who are complex,” she says. “We all carry invisible scars that shape who we are, but what inspires me most is seeing people move forward in spite of them.”
She does not dress up where it comes from. “I’ve had experiences that shaped me too, and I can’t hide that very well,” she says. “A friend once called me the girl with the scar, and I guess that’s what people see. That’s probably why I feel so connected to these women.”
There is a physical side to it the credits skip over. Silvana Damm trained in martial arts and stunts, taekwondo among them. It means she can take the roles where the feeling and the fighting land in the same shot, and there are not many actresses who can do both without one going soft.
The schooling behind that runs long. Meisner based on the William Esper approach. RADA in London. She works in German, French and English, and carries a spread of accents from BBC English to Eastern European. That is the kit that has let her cross from one market to another without stumbling.
A Career Beyond Borders
And cross she does. Silvana Damm has a supporting part in Wind of Change, the Scorpions biopic Alex Ranarivelo shot in London, with Dominic West and Alexander Dreymon in the cast. Her CV lists The Prototype as well, directed by Dennis Gansel for Amazon in Germany. Put it to her that a German set and a London set must feel like two different jobs, and she will not have it.
“It’s actually remarkably similar,” she says. “Once you’re filming, there’s a shared language that exists across productions, whether you’re in Germany or England.”
The real gap, she has found, sits off to the side of the work, before anyone calls action. Headshots. Showreels. Auditions. The plain business of how people talk to each other on the job, which is never quite the same twice. Reading those codes, market to market, is the part she calls one of the most useful things she has learned. On the floor, though, the job is just the job.
A Storyteller at Heart
Writing and directing run next to the acting, not against it. She wrote and directed Mädchen, a short that took Best First Time Filmmaker at Cannes Indie Shorts. What she kept from that shoot has nothing to do with the trophy. Her three leads were kids, six to thirteen. She put in the hours with them before the camera rolled, making sure they were at ease. First day, the youngest one turned to her mother and told her she could leave. She felt safe on set.
“That was probably the biggest compliment I could have received as a first-time director,” Silvana Damm says. There is more where that came from. Damm is currently developing her debut novel alongside its television adaptation. Same person on both sides of the lens, then: someone hauling something heavy who keeps walking anyway. German set or English one, whichever the day hands her, Damm is still out looking for that woman.