NEWS & MEDIA
Atena Eshtiaghi Joins Clouds Hill
July 2025
Composer Atena Eshtiaghi has begun a new professional collaboration with Clouds Hill Publishing, a company known for supporting innovative and genre-defying artists across the globe. This partnership marks a new chapter in her musical career.
Reflecting on this milestone, Eshtiaghi shared:
“Becoming part of the Clouds Hill family feels like the puzzle piece I’ve been searching for in my artistic journey.”
Atena Eshtiaghi Becomes a Member of the European Film Academy
May 2025
Composer Atena Eshtiaghi has been invited to be a member of the European Film Academy, an organization that brings together film professionals from across the world. Members of the Academy are eligible to vote for the European Film Awards.
Jury Member
German Documentary Film Music Award 2025
Following her 2024 win for the score of My Stolen Planet, composer Atena Eshtiaghi has been selected as a jury member for the German Documentary Film Music Award 2025 at DOK.fest München. The award honors outstanding original compositions in documentary filmmaking. Eshtiaghi joins a panel of respected industry professionals to evaluate this year’s submissions and help highlight the vital role of music in documentary storytelling.
Hinz & Kunst Magazine Interview with Atena Eshtiaghi
July 31, 2024 by Anna-Elisa Jakob
“Sie beobachte das immer wieder, sagt Atena Eshtiaghi: dass Frauen, die aus dem Iran ins Ausland gingen, sich plötzlich entfalten wie eine Blume. Wenn man nur genau hinsieht, könne man sie überall entdecken, diese blühenden Frauen. Und niemand könne sie stoppen – sie daran hindern, kreativ zu sein und zu wachsen.”
Jury Statement for the German Documentary Film Music Award 2024
“The film music of Atena Eshtiaghi is effective mainly in what it doesn’t do. She defies the conventions of illustrative film music and instead uses silence as a stylistic device for this radical and personal film by Farahnaz Sharifi.”
“Atena Eshtiaghi gives strong expression to these dispatches of uncensored life by not exaggerating the images in an emotive way but accompanying them with minimalistic patterns. This creates a distancing effect and, at the same time, forms intervals of time in which a deep sorrow is inscribed. Eshtiaghi’s music does not dress the film with a pleasing rhythm but rather stresses heterogeneity and, through its precise structure, creates a space for the film’s themes to resonate: isolation, resistance, hope.”
Endless Borders: Rotterdam Review
Screendaily, by Neil Young, 6 February 2023
“Unfolding mainly in short, to-the-point scenes, the film increases steadily in tension in the latter third as the two couples unite in a desperate flight to freedom. The smoothly-handled shift towards thriller-like terrain is underlined by the escalation in volume and prominence of Atena Eshtiaghi’s score; dominated by woodwinds and strings, her music often organically blends with background noises of blustery weather and thrumming machinery to unnervingly ominous effect.”
