Gustavo Santaolalla x Jacqueline Lentzou
Pleiades (or Going Home)
Gustavo Santaolalla
In his youth, Gustavo Santaolalla, born on 19 August 1951 in Ciudad Jardín Lomas del Palomar in Argentina, listened to both Nat King Cole and The Beach Boys. He joined a few rock bands where he combined American rock with Argentine rock nacional. His innovative sound caught on, which earned him a first of three eponymous albums: Santaolalla. In 2000, he started composing film music for Amores perros, followed by 21 Grams and Diarios de motocicleta. He is one of three composers to ever win two Oscars in a row. That happened in 2005 for Brokeback Mountain and for Babel in 2006.
After films like Biutiful, On the Road and The Book of Life, Santaolalla worked mostly for television series, among which The Last of Us is best known. This post-apocalyptic story was released as a video game in 2013 and has since lived on on the small screen. Santaolalla, through his son, was struck by the close bond between the game's characters and players. His music has since become part of the characters' DNA. Gustavo Santaolalla is a brilliant guitarist and also plays the charango, a South American stringed instrument. By regularly using folk music instruments, he gives his music a unique sound idiom. At the World Soundtrack Awards, he was Discovery of the Year in 2004 (21 Grams) and received the Public Choice Award in 2006 (Brokeback Mountain). In 2015, he followed up with another award for best original song from The Book of Life.
Jacqueline Lentzou
Jacqueline Lentzou (Athens, 1989) is an artist whose cinematic language involves discovering poetry in - seemingly - mundane premises. A London Film School graduate, she was quick to discover her personal style which is based on word and image association, the dream-construct, intuition. She experiments with formats, durations, and tones. She discusses liminality and loneliness, belonging, love, and most importantly, the lack of it. Jacqueline Lentzou is the recipient of numerous prominent awards, including the Leica Cine Discovery Award by Semaine de La Critique (Cannes) for Hector Malot: The Last Day of the Year (2018), as well as the Grand Prix in Reykjavik IFF and Sevilla Film Festival for Moon, 66 Questions (2021), her debut feature which premiered in Berlinale Encounters Competition, receiving raving reviews globally.
Retrospectives on her full body of work have taken place in Montreal, Vienna, Porto and Ghent, with the most recent one held in London, in the historic Institute of Contemporary Art, in June 2022. She has screened her work twice at the MoMa and she is the first Greek whose work got curated by the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. Additionally, she has served on several occasions as a jury member, with the latest one being in Pune International Film Festival (2023, India), where she had the honor to work with Stig Björkman and Kim Dong-ho. Her second feature project A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra was granted the NIPKOW fellowship. Now she is working on the final draft of her script, while teaching Acting on Camera at the drama school of Athens Conservatory.
