The World Soundtrack Awards‘ Discovery of the Year prize has a knack for spotting emerging talent. Gustavo Santaolalla (“21 Grams”), Michael Giacchino (“The Incredibles”) and Nicholas Britell (“Moonlight”) all won it before reshaping the modern film score, and recent winners Daniel Blumberg (“The Brutalist”) and Jerskin Fendrix (“Poor Things”) look set to follow.
Meet this year’s five nominees.
Mari Fukuhara (“Little Amélie or the Character of Rain”)
Mari Fukuhara started piano at three, before studying classical music at Toho Gakuen School of Music while playing in jazz and pop bands on the side. She later established herself as a solo artist. “Looking back, I don’t think I followed a straight path toward becoming a composer,” she says. “Rather, all these different musical experiences naturally led me toward film.”
“Being involved from such an early stage allowed the relationship between the film and its music to grow over time,” Fukuhara says. “It was very important to express a child’s perception and imagination, and what ‘reality’ means to a child. I felt that one of the important roles of the music was to make Amélie’s experience of the world feel real.”
Paris Hurley (“The Chronology of Water”)
That visceral response reflects a lifelong fascination with music as a physical experience. “Sound is immersive,” she says. “I’m always looking to hold people in the sound, whether it’s hitting you in the face, inside your ear or all around you. Film is a fun way to explore that because it can be so grand. Music physically changes you, whether you make it or listen to it.”
Hannah Peel (“Midwinter Break”)
She’s now scoring Netflix’s “Assassin’s Creed” series, drawing on the games while developing a sound that blends ancient and new. “Everything about it has been brilliant,” she says. “I’ve been able to explore instruments I can’t find in sample libraries, so I can build my own sound worlds. That gets me very excited, because I have something that doesn’t sound like anything else, and the production has been open and supportive.”
Kangding Ray (“Sirāt”)
Sam Slater (“2000 Meters to Andriivka”)
“That catalyzed a love of not only film work but also the experimental underbelly of it, which has always been where my curiosity lies,” he says.
His work now spans formats, from the Emmy-winning documentary “2000 Meters to Andriivka,” directed by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mstyslav Chernov, to the PlayStation 5 game “Saros,” which NME called “the stuff of nightmares.”
That range suits him. “Once you move into non-diegetic sound, an abstract expression of a story or emotion, you’ve entered a wonderful world,” he says. “Our generation wants to expand the palette as much as possible. The fact that we debate whether something is sound design or music means we’ve reached the strange and wonderful edges of what music is in these contexts, and I find that thrilling.”
