Composers of ‘The Chronology of Water,’ ‘Sirat’ Among World Soundtrack Awards’ Discovery Nominees

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.”

In 2020, French producers approached Fukuhara about licensing one of her recordings for a new film. Within months, she had instead signed on to compose the original score for a pilot project that would eventually become “Little Amélie or the Character of Rain.”

“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.”

Looking ahead, Fukuhara hopes to return to live performance while pursuing projects “driven more by images, atmosphere and feeling than by a clear narrative — a film where I could explore a different kind of musical space.”

Paris Hurley (“The Chronology of Water”)

Trained as a classical violinist from an early age, Paris Hurley earned acclaim for her autobiographical live project Object as Subject before turning to film. “I’d been told over and over that my music is very cinematic,” she says. “It has a forward momentum and a deep emotional core that takes the listener somewhere. That sense of leading someone through an emotional journey is what people were responding to.”

After working alongside Clint Mansell on “Love Lies Bleeding,” Hurley handled Kristen Stewart’s “The Chronology of Water” on her own, pursuing the project after tearing through the source memoir. “I read it in a weekend, and my whole body shot through with fire,” she recalls. “I immediately knew I was supposed to score the film.”

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”)

Hannah Peel got her start doing session work on violin, trombone and piano for a range of artists, all while angling for film and TV. When the Royal College of Music told her she wasn’t classical enough for its film music master’s, she went her own way, releasing records built around a hand-punched paper-strip music box. The unusual instrument eventually caught the attention of music advisors on projects including “Anna Karenina” and “Dancing With the Stars.”

Peel’s work on the 2019 documentary “Game of Thrones: The Last Watch” landed her an Emmy nomination and an agent, and she’s been working steadily since, refining a style balanced between acoustic and electronic textures. “It’s much more common now for people to create their own sounds, and that blur between sound design and music is where I like to sit,” she says.

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”)

Trained as an architect and born as David Letellier, Kangding Ray made his name in Berlin’s experimental music scene, quietly releasing music on Raster-Noton, the German label known for artists including Ryoji Ikeda, Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto. His experimental and ambient work gradually gave way to dance and, almost naturally, to film. His first score, for 2022’s “Kiss My Wounds,” caught the attention of German awards voters. Soon, director Oliver Laxe came calling, inviting him to score “Sirāt.”

The process began unusually early. Ray started work two years before the shoot, with Laxe spending five-day stretches at his Berlin studio. By the time cameras rolled, roughly 80% of the score had been written from the script. The result is about 62 minutes of music, concentrated in key scenes. “It’s either fully present or not there at all,” he says. He also pushed for silence, convinced the music hits harder when it arrives.

Sam Slater (“2000 Meters to Andriivka”)

Sam Slater fell into film scoring by accident. A self-described “studio nerd,” the Berlin-based composer started as a sound designer and creative engineer for Jóhann Jóhannsson, Dustin O’Halloran and Hildur Guðnadóttir, whom he later married (“which is lovely”).

“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.”