The Nominees 2021

Born in Regensburg in 1980, Christoph Zirngibl graduated in “Scoring for Film and Television” at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Munich in 2007. His first ever movie score was the short “Eyes in the City” (2003) by “Finis Terrae” director Konstantin Ferstl. Since then, Christoph Zirngibl, who masters most diverse musical genres, has written scores for more than 80 movies such as “Angst”, “Jerry Cotton” and “Victory Day”. For Finis Terrae, he also produced an acclaimed concert at the premiere of the film in 2019 with the music performed live to picture by 120 musicians.

Zirngibl’s music has been awarded the German Filmmusic Newcomer Award, the Jerry Goldsmith Award, the price of the German TV Academy, and a Hollywood Music in Media Award.

Jan Inge “Ginge” Berentsen Anvik (born 1970 in Japan) started out in electronica in 1990. Before scoring his first movie in 2005 he was playing festivals, making records and music for dance performances with the electronica duo SubGud while collaborating with rock- and black metal acts, composing for theater, documentaries and singers in Namibia, Swaziland and South Africa. After 2005 his main occupation has been scoring films and TV-series, working mostly on Norwegian productions with the odd foreign exception. As of 2020 his work includes 29 feature films, 5 TV-series and a number of documentaries and shorts. His style is electronic, orchestral, experimental and a mix.

Johan Ramström was born 1965 in a small town in Sweden. He did get a saxophone instead of a moped as a teen, and yes, music was important, but not yet more important than visual art and film. The wish to become a composer came to him much later in life.   He played in different groups; mixtures of jazz, pop, covers and dance music. Standing too close to the cymbals night after night, he injured his ears, being unable to play for a long while. At that time he went to a concert with  the Stockholm Radio Symphony Orchestra  and discovered the acoustic orchestral music, the untampered tones of the instruments, a complex world of sounds and silences.

Johan went to study composition with two internationally well established composers: Anders Nilsson in Sthlm and Jan Sandström at Piteå College of Music / Luleå University of Technology 1996 – 2006. Johan Ramström has since received commissions to write music for all kinds of ensembles; Symphony Orchestras, solo instruments, Opera, electronic music as well as art installations.

Johan Ramström is also a frequent composer of film music, a media that caught his interest already in his teens. 

Since 2012 he is associate professor, lecturing in filmscoring at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm.

John Gürtler (*1981) is a multiple award-winning film composer currently based in Berlin. He has written over 40 film scores and produces electronic music, songs and orchestral work and has won several awards, including ‘Best Song in a Film’ at the 2014 German Film Music Awards for ‘What Love Is’, the ‘German Documentary Award’ for ‘Above and Below’ at DOK.fest München in 2015 and the ‘European Original Score 2019’ for ‘System Crasher’, presented by the European Film Academy.

John was raised in London by Portuguese-German parents. After briefly living in the U.S. and Portugal, he moved to Germany where he studied Saxophone at the University of Arts in Berlin. During his studies, he increasingly turns towards the piano, vocals and any instrument he could get his hands on. After touring internationally with different bands and orchestras, John studied film music at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg. Ever since, John had the chance to work with the diverse Berlin music scene at his studio Paradox Paradise, always in close collaboration with Jan Miserre, co-composer and producer. Their recent film projects include the multiple award-winning documentary Space Dogs, the German television drama series Charité at War and Nora Fingscheidt’s debut feature System Crasher. An adamant improviser, John uses the studio as a room for electro acoustic (sound) experimentation, straying away from standardized sounds whenever possible and finding an individual language for each project where the borders between score, sound and source music start to dissolve.

Venturing out and returning to his roots as an experimental improviser and producer, John has released on Dial Records remixing Efdemin under his moniker The Borderland State and on Sky Walking with the newly formed Sollmann & Gürtler project. He has recently released two albums under his own name: “Songs 2005-2015” and the electro-acoustic “Eigenlicht” on Counterchange Recordings. For many years, John has been an associate lecturer for music and sound design at the Film Academy BW and the HSD in Düsseldorf. He is a member of both the German and the European Film Academy.

SØS Gunver Ryberg is an award winning composer, sound artist and live performer known for her releases and also her extensive compositional and soundtrack work for video games, films, international theatre and dance productions. She has been awarded several times for her music and significantly a BAFTA nomination for her work on the multi award winning video game INSIDE and several awards and nominations for the Cutterhead score. She creates genre-defying electronic music. Touring all over the world to perform at festivals, clubs, museums, galleries, planetarium, cinemas and churches to more unconventional contexts like an old industrial ship, underwater reservoir or a running metro train.

Lau Nau (Laura Naukkarinen) is an internationally known name in the Finnish music scene. A composer, producer and performer whose music is imbued with an idiosyncratic, finely honed sound world. She uses electroacoustic instrumentation: from traditional instruments and voice to analogue synthesisers, field recordings and experimental sounds.

Lau Nau has composed music to 7 long films, for example Själö – Island of Souls 2020, additional music with Matti Bye for Tove 2020 and Aurora 2019. She has released 7 albums in Europe, USA and Japan and composed for silent films, theatre, dance and sound installations.

Jaakko Laitinen & Väärä Raha was founded in 2009 by five Finnish Laplanders living in Helsinki. Their music is their own fusion music with Balkan grooves and old school Finnish schlagers as the main elements. The band has released five critically acclaimed albums, toured over 20 countries and attained the reputation of Finland’s finest live band with over 70 gigs per year. The band won the prestigious Rovaniemi City Culture Deed Prize in 2019.

André Dziezuk is a Luxembourgish and French musician who studied in the conservatory and the university of musicology in Metz. In addition to his teaching career (oboe and Computer Music) at the music School of Dudelange (LU), André Dziezuk began composing film music in 1999.

He signed the soundtracks of about thirty feature films, francophone (“Illégal” by Olivier Masset-Depasse, “J’enrage de son absence” by S. Bonnaire, “Avant l’Hiver” by P. Claudel …), or international (“Colonia” by F. Gallenberger, “Secrets of War” by D. Bots, “Egon Schiele” by D. Berner …).

He was nominated for the France-Musique / Sacem Prize for Film Music in 2010 (“Illégal”) and 2016 (“Coup de Chaud”) and won the “Jam Prize for Best Music” at the Mediterranean Film Festival in Montpellier for “Tel Aviv on Fire” by Sameh Zaobi.

He is currently working on Barbara Kronenberg’s upcoming film, “Mission Ulja Funk”.

In 2017, Norwegian composer Gaute Storaas won the Camille Award for his score in the Oscar nominated Swedish film «A man called Ove».

Storaas grew out of the vibrant musical community of his hometown Bergen in the late 70s. After graduating from Berklee College of Music in Boston, he started working as an arranger in Norway. Gradually shifting his attention to composing for visual media, his music found its way into every Norwegian home in 1992 when he wrote all the ident music for the country’s first commercial tv-channel, TV2.

Since then, he has scored a long list of films and tv shows, ranging from animations for children, (3 «Elias» films, «In the Forest of Huckybucky,) to dramas like «The Last King» by Oscar nominee Nils Gaup and «The last Sentence», by legendary Swedish director Jan Troell. Storaas has received multiple awards.

Labrinth is a multi platinum-selling singer, songwriter, producer, and composer of one of 2019’s biggest shows, HBO’s Euphoria.  In addition to lending his singular, genre-blending sound to the series, Labrinth wrote and performed the show’s finale-capping song “All For Us,” featuring Zendaya, which just won an Emmy for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics for. His score has also recently garnered an Ivor Novello win for “Best Television Soundtrack” and a further Emmy nomination for Outstanding Music Composition for a series (original dramatic score). The score soundtrack has so far generated over 400 million streams worldwide.

As a solo artist, Labrinth is best known for global hits including “Jealous”, which to date has garnered over 415 million streams on Spotify alone. Labrinth is one third of supergroup LSD, alongside Sia and Diplo, whose titular debut album has garnered over 1 billion streams worldwide in the year since its release. He has collaborated with Beyoncé, co-writing and co-producing the Golden Globe and Grammy nominated song “Spirit”, the lead single in Disney’s 2019 live-action The Lion King. Other artists he has collaborated with include Nicki Minaj, Eminem, The Weeknd, Ed Sheeran, and Kanye West on the album Jesus is King. Labrinth’s most recent album Imagination & The Misfit Kid includes the singles “Miracle”, “Mount Everest” and the aforementioned “All For Us”.

Manel Santisteban was born in Madrid in 1956. Self-taught and eclectic. Influenced and motivated by his parent fond of Jazz,initially he dedicates himself to Jazz. During the eighties, attracted by synthesizers, he slipped into Pop and records, adapted and composed for renowned artists such as Tino Casal, Mecano, Radio Futura, Monserrat Caballé,The Mondragón Orchestra, Ana Belén, Olé Olé, Pepe de Lucia,or Julio Iglesias.

In 1985, he formed La Decada Prodigiosa, the group recorded eleven albums, represented Spain in Eurovision Song Contest (1988), and reached the sum of nineteen platinum discs. In 1983 he received the prize of the Circle of Cinematographic Writers, and in 1986 he directed and arranged the music of Matador of Pedro Almodovar. In 1997, he obtained the First place prize in the international composer contest of the John Lennon Songwriting (www.jlsc.com). In 1996, he began to compose the music of more than 800 episodes of the fiction series (Vis a Vis, La Casa de Papel: Money Heist) and many others. In 2005, he was nominated in the Music Awards (SGAE-AIE) for the African Spirit album. As a film composer he worked with Fernando González Molina in his films Fuga de Cerebros, Tres Metros Sobre el Cielo and Tengo Ganas de Ti. With Carlos Theron in Fuga de Cerebros 2.
And with Alex Pina in Kamikaze.

Ivan Martinez Lacámara

Born in Zaragoza in 1977 in a family of musicians, he began his musical studies at the age of 5, going through the Conservatory and various music schools, until obtaining the Professional Degree in Piano and Harmony in 1998. In 1999 he met the composer Manel Santisteban, with whom he collaborated in many projects over the years. Since then, he has composed the Original Soundtrack of many television series, spots, and short films, as well as arrangements and musical production in films, tours and records. Some of his most outstanding works in the field of TV series include: “Money Heist”, “Locked up”, “The Boat”, “Un, dos, tres”.