SoundTrack_Cologne 23 announces nominees

SoundTrack_Cologne 23 announces nominees for the PEER RABEN MUSIC AWARD

Nine composers are nominated for the PEER RABEN MUSIC AWARD. The winner will be announced at the festival awards ceremony on July 17 at the COMEDIA Theater.

The PEER RABEN MUSIC AWARD honors the Best Original Music in a Short Film. The winner receives a prize money of 1,500 euros. First presented in 2009, the award commemorates the great German film composer Peer Raben.

Nominated are seven film scores from festival highlights of the international short film scene, recognised for their innovative and dramaturgically coherent use of music and sound in relation to the narrative.

This year's selection features award-winning titles including The Apricot, winner of Best Animated Short Film at the New York International Children's Film Festival and Best Animated Short for Kids at the Portland Festival of Cinema, as well as The Gathering Light, selected for Flickerfest, Australia's leading international short film festival.

The nominees:

- Ksenia Ignatenko & Leticia Martínez Goás (A Better You, directed by Arina Popa)
- Becca Schack (Unbound, directed by Kendra Copeland)
- Dayanera Alipour & Maximilian Lindinger (MELPOMENE - Fragments of a fever dream, directed by Kai Sieber)
- Daniel Duque (The Gathering Light, directed by Xavier Masson-Leach)
- Ayda Akbal (Rough Ways, directed by Benjamin McFadden)
- Pascal Horn (The Apricot, directed by Alex Avila)
- Lukas Geppert (Lantern, directed by Leopold Schraudolph)

The competition screening will take place on Thursday, July 16, at 18:30, at Odeon Kino 2. To buy tickets for the screening, click here.

A Better You plunges us into a near-future dystopia where positivity is enforced by law. A woman desperate to keep her vulnerable brother safe must perform emotional labour for a therapy dog and survive a system that has already swallowed everyone around her. Unbound explores the realities of stereotypical typecasting through the story of a talented Black actress in a powerful one-woman show. In MELPOMENE – Fragments of a Fever Dream, theatrical performer Lucien tries to let go of the stress of a recent performance, only to find himself drawn into an emotional conversation about young artists’ fears and uncertainties for the future. Selected for Australia's Flickerfest Film Festival, The Gathering Light follows an old man searching for jewels in the Hawkesbury River. Set in the wild Washington Territory of 1887, Rough Ways centres on the battle of The Kid, who suddenly faces a choice that might determine the rest of his life. The hand-drawn 2D animated film The Apricot tells the story of a 10-year-old boy experiencing his first summer working on his family's apricot farm; a two-time award-winning project based on real childhood memories the director holds dear. Lantern takes us into another dystopian world, where a girl must befriend the magical creature trapped inside a lantern in order to escape her captor and the cruel system he upholds.

The nominees and their films will be presented to audience and jury under the moderation of composer André Feldhaus.

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