IndieLisboa regrets the death of Jóhann Jóhannsson, composer and director who in 2015 received the International Competition Short Film Award with End of Summer, a film in which the Antarctic landscapes are animated by animal life and human memory. At the time, the jury decided to award the prize to the film for the reasons we now understand as part of his legacy:
“For it’s visual beauty, timelessness and nostalgic familiarity, accentuated with great emotional veracity by a musical score that punctuates each of the concepts of resilience, eternal migration and fragile existence, the Short Film Grand Prize is awarded to End of Summer. – The jury would like to note the film transported us to an impossible place of such melancholic beauty, employing simple observation at its most elemental yet yielding great depth and complex connections to a common emotional chain. We felt this beautiful, abstract landscape someplace we would not be invited to again.”
Best known for his work as a composer (The Theory of Everything, Sicario, among others), and one of the most interesting of the last decade, Jóhann Jóhannsson directed only one film, a work of endless beauty.