World Soundtrack Awards Integrates With Film Fest Ghent — SkimNews
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- World Soundtrack Awards is integrating its Film Music Days (Oct. 8-10) with the main Film Fest Ghent program for the first time in its 26-year history, rather than running after it, according to program director Wim De Witte.
- Film Fest Ghent opens with Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont's "Coward" — Belgium's Oscar submission — on Oct. 7, and Dhont will appear in a WSA talk with his composer Valentin Hadjadj and music supervisor Pierre-Marie Dru.
- Edward Berger and composer Volker Bertelmann, two-time WSA Film Composer of the Year, will participate in a second filmmaker-composer talk, framing both conversations around how directors communicate musical intent to composers.
- Third Character, an annual film music market co-organized with Music & Cinéma Marseille, will hold matchmaking sessions in Ghent that pair composers with producer-director teams developing new projects.
- Lukas Dhont and Valentin Hadjadj first met at a 2013 Third Character session in France as students — a partnership De Witte cites as proof the Ghent incubator model works, alongside director Jacqueline Lentzou and composer Colin Stetson, who met on Ghent's 2023 jury and went on to make Venice Horizons prize-winner "A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra."
- AI in film scoring remains unavoidable on WSA boards, De Witte says, but the real audience to convince is producers — not machines — that human composers should write the music.
Why it matters: By moving Film Music Days into the festival's opening weekend, organizers are betting that an earlier slot and tighter filmmaker overlap will pull in more industry attendees — and the matchmaking format has already produced two notable collaborations (Dhont-Hadjadj in 2013, Lentzou-Stetson in 2023) that arguably justify the incubator pitch to producers who might otherwise automate scoring budgets.
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