19/01/2015 - The Icelandic composer scored UK contender The Theory of Everything, while the Finnish cinematographer filmed Concrete Night

Icelandic composer and producer Jóhann Jóhannsson has garnered one of the five Oscar nominations for UK director James Marsh’s The Theory of Everything [+see also:
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film profile] – the biopic of English theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking – for which he has already won a Golden Globe for Best Original Score and earned a BAFTA Film Award nomination for Best Original Music.

Besides Icelandic features, shorts and TV series, Jóhannsson delivered the score for French director Denis Villeneuve’saward-winning thriller Prisoners (2013), and he also worked with the director on his most recent crime drama, Sicario, which is yet to be released.

Last year, Jóhannsson made his directorial debut with End of Summer, a short filmed on the island of South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula, which he also wrote, shot, edited, mixed and scored. He also composed the music for Danish director Phie Ambo’s Good Things Await, co-produced by Iceland’s Hlín Jóhannesdóttir, which – like End of Summer – was screened at the CPH:DOX–Copenhagen International Film Festival. 

Meanwhile, Finnish cinematographer Peter Flinckenberg has become the country’s first filmmaker to receive a nomination for the American Society of Cinematographer’s (ASC’s) Spotlight Award, for his work on Finnish director Pirjo Honkasalo's Concrete Night [+see also:
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Flinckenberg, who also lensed Finnish director Selma Vilhunen’s Oscar-nominated short Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?, most recently shot Finnish director Amir Escandari’s documentary Pixadores [+see also:
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film profile], aka Windcatchers, for which he is nominated for a Jussi, Finland’s national film prize; he also cashed in on one of the six Jussi Awards for Concrete Night, which was in the running for the Nordic Council Film Prize.