The Wait by Salonen premieres at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

The award for Best Original Score at the 25th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival this year went to Esa-Pekka Salonen for his evocative score for The Wait. The film was featured in the event’s Official Selection and is Salonen’s first foray into film composition. The score features new music by Salonen as well as extracts from his concert works Cello Concerto, Gambit and Knock, Breathe, Shine.

The award ceremony of the 25th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) took place on November 27 with awards handed to the winners of the four competition programmes of the festival.

The Best Original Score prize went to Finland’s Esa-Pekka Salonen for his score for The Wait, described by the jury as, at the same time, both “emotionally raw” and “spiritually liberating”.

Jury comment: “Creating a score which is not only spiritually liberating, its emotional rawness not only gets under the skin of the audience, but perfectly reflects the inner passions, loves and insecurities of the three main characters, the Jury Prize for Best Original Score goes to Esa-Pekka Salonen for The Wait (Odotus) from Finland.”

Adapted from Juhani Aho’s novel The Pastor’s Wife, this 100-minute film The Wait, directed by Aku Louhimies, is a story about a woman undergoing an emotional battle between sense and passion. The universal themes of love, honesty and longing come to play on a secluded island in the Finnish archipelago isolated from the world afflicted by a pandemic. The film is also “the first carbon-negative film in the world”.