Nordic Film Music Days announces Harpa nominees, Berlinale programme

Berlinale: Composers Jonas Struck, Sanna Salmenkallio, Tóti Guðnason, Erik Ljunggren and Johan Testad will be discussing their craft on Saturday ahead of the awards ceremony.

After last year’s fully-online edition, the 12^th Nordic Film Music Days (February 12-13) will be back in a hybrid version.

The two-days of seminars, awards and screenings, will be streamed live from Berlin’s Nordische Botschaften, via new virtual hubs in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

CLICK HERE to sign up for seminars.

This year’s five nominees competing for the coveted Harpa Nordic Film Composers Award are the following:

• Jonas Struck (Denmark), for his score of Christina Rosendahl’s feature The Good Traitor.
  A graduate from the Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen, Struck has worked on a range of films such Borg vs McEnroe, Qeda-Man Divided, the US TV drama Conrad & Michelle-If Words Could Kill and Netflix’s Norwegian original series Ragnarok 2.

• Sanna Salmenkallio (Finland) for her score of Virpi Suutari’s documentary Aalto.
  Salmenkallio has both a classical music education from Sibelius Academy and an education as Sound Designer from the Theatre Academy. She has worked with symphony orchestras, smaller ensembles, and electronic music and composed the scores of more than 30 films, notably Three Rooms of Melancholia, Garden Lovers, Entrepreneur, and Aalto for which she won local Jussi award.

• Tóti Guðnason (Iceland) for the score of Valdimar Jóhansson’s Lamb.
  Guðnason graduated in classical composition from the Iceland University of the Arts and has been a touring musician both with his art metal band Agent Fresco and with the late Jóhann Jóhannsson. He has assisted several renowned fellow composers such as his sister Hildur Guðnadóttir on the Oscar-winning original score for Joker, Högni Egilsson on Netflix’s series Katla and Ólafur Arnalds on Broadchurch. Lamb is his first score as sole composer.

• Erik Ljunggren (Norway) for the score of Itonje Søimer Guttormsen’s feature Gritt.
  Ljunggren is a producer, mixer, musician and composer. He has played for the well-known heavy metal group Seigmen, Vampire State Building among others. Gritt is his first film score for which he received an Amanda nomination 2021.

• Johan Testad (Sweden) for the score of Peter Grönlund’s HBO Max series Beartown.
  Testad is a composer and musician. His credits include the film Drifters, TV series The Sandhamn Murders, Inkognito, and SVT’s upcoming thriller Missing People. He holds a previous Harpa nomination for Peter Grönlund’s Drifters, for which he won a Guldbagge-Best Music Award.

The Harpa Awards winners will be announced Saturday February 12.

Ahead of the awards ceremony, each composer will discuss their work and craft on Saturday (between 12.00-16.00 CET), as part of Nordic Film Music Day’s Creating the Score overarching theme.

Other talks will focus on soundtracks, how to prepare and release them, the workflow of a composer, copyrights with the Digital Single Market Directive.

Nordic Film Music Days is supported among others by Nordisk Film & Tv Fond.

For further information check: www.nordicfilmmusicdays.com