The Colombian composer Mateo Ojeda has been nominated for the German Peer Raben Award for his work on the short film Pantaleón. The prizewinner will be announced during the sixteenth edition of SoundTrack Cologne
The event will be held from August 28 to September 2 in Cologne, Germany. It is a congress focused on music and sound for movies, video games, and multimedia projects. This leading European event is aimed at international audiovisual industry professionals as well as general audiences interested in the sound created for audiovisual projects, with cinema as its main focus. Roundtables, panels, workshops, and networking events are organized every year to approach sound from its artistic, technical, cultural, and economic aspects, promoting professionalization and networking.
The event hosts the Peer Raben Music Award for short film projects, granted annually since 2009. In this edition, the Colombian Mateo Ojeda, a graduate of the music program of the Autonomous University of Bucaramanga (UNAB) and a former member of the audiovisual arts program of the same institution, was nominated in this category for his work on the short film Pantaleón, a work that was born as an abstraction of the war as witnessed by the young director Diana Ojeda, the composer's sister, who accompanied land resistance movements alongside Colombia’s peasants and farmers.
Pantaleón tells the story of a farmer boy who, by sheer chance, ends up resolving an absurd war among the many that have taken place Colombia, as is the case with the War of a Thousand Days, says Mateo Ojeda. Regarding his music, he points out that the composition is itself a product of a detailed dialogue with the director. “We concluded that the music should above all be raw, aggressive, and untempered. It might seem simple, but achieving it musically was a challenge of many weeks of continuous work. In the end, the intention was always to achieve an authentic sound, more rugged than violent, that conveyed musically what is not seen onscreen.”
Mateo Ojeda holds a bachelor's degree in music theory and composition from the Autonomous University of Bucaramanga (UNAB) in Colombia and a Kontakt Studium diploma in new composition techniques from Hochschule für Musik und Hamburg Theater and the European Live Electronics Center (EULEC) in Lüneburg, Germany. He has composed concert music pieces as well as music for film, television, and advertising since 2003. Ojeda has written music for more than twenty short films and two documentary feature films for which he has received several composition awards in Colombia and Germany, including Once colores sordos (2003), El mundo de Verona (2006) Galán (2013), Pantaleón (2015), Agua:Cero (2015), Infierno o Paraíso (2014), and Once (2018). He is currently co-founder and composer at RED Sounddesign & Filmmusik and a part-time music teacher at Junge Musikakademie and Happy Music School in Hamburg, Germany.
