Here's an excerpt from the festival jury consisting of Arno Dierickx, Tom Bijnen and Pieter Perquin:
The jury saw and heard quite a lot of interesting work and was impressed with the high standard of the individual compositions and sound designs. The jury was a little less impressed by the low number of soundtracks that showed an urge to think completely out of the box, to see the task as an opportunity to redefine or recreate a film from scratch with music and sounds. All in all, it was a pleasure to watch the nominated films and an honour to decide about the winners.
The jury fell compelled to honour a specific film with a ‘Special Mention’.
Introducing, for the first time in the history of the Unheard Film Festival, ‘the jury’s special mention’ goes to a soundtrack that was perceived as one of few that is not mainly supporting the image or following the obvious story. This soundtrack shows guts and although matching the image perfectly, it is telling it’s own story, creating a parallel world and revealing a hidden dimension that puts the film in a new perspective.
The ‘special mention’ goes to Antti Mäki for Mem.
The second prize goes to a soundtrack that shows great craftsmanship, spanning a single and continuous composition over a complex story. Musical accents and transitions hit the exact right tone for the film without ever going over the top and support the film equally in it’s suspense, it’s humour and it’s emotion, making the absence of additional sounds almost irrelevant.
The second prize goes to Nathan Stornetta for Cookies: Touch Me
The first prize goes to a soundtrack that is perfect on more than one level. It is impressive in it’s complexity, but fully transparent and crystal clear at the same time. Music, sounds and effects bring this film alive, probably even better than the original soundtrack. A succession of different but perfectly matching musical styles, accompanied by sounds that keep pushing forward, revealing not only lots of details, but spanning an overall arc that makes a film that is chaotic in itself, look like completely balanced. This is about storytelling and this soundtrack is the work of someone who knows how to make choices. In the eyes of this jury, it were the right choices.
The first prize goes to Andrew Simmons for The Last Dream
IFMCA Award
The International Film Music Critics Association bestows the independent press prize to Matt Davies and Oliver Cadman of the Jazz Department of Leeds College of Music in the United Kingdom, for their score to the film Cherry Picking (from the archives of the Netherlands Eye Film Institute, 3:22).
Here is a quote from the jury rapport: The winning score enhances the impression of summer, stillness, and labor in a pastoral setting. It is unmistakably modern-day music, which simultaneously does accompany the silent images of yesteryear. With minimal means the music achieves an impressive effect. This score lends the rather repetitive editing of the images a cohesion, by creating a tension which completes the storyline.
