Los Angeles – based film music composer George Kallis has been presented with the International Film Music Critics Association Award for Breakthrough Composer of the Year.
Born in Cyprus, Kallis studied film composition at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, with a masters degree in composition from the Royal College of music in London; he began his career as a songwriter, penning the Cypriot entry for the 1999 Eurovision Song Contest – “Thanai Erotas” by Marlain – before making his film music debut in 2006, with the WWII drama Joy Division. His subsequent scores included the sci-fi sequel Highlander: The Source in 2007, the British crime thriller Screwed in 2011, the Russian biopic Gagarin: First in Space in 2013, and the Nigerian drama 93 Days in 2016.
The 43 year old Cypriot composer got a well-deserved not by the influential website Movie Music UK, which hands out annual awards. Proclaiming him to be the ‘Breakthrough Composer of the Year’, the website states that “although he’s been writing music for films since around 2007, 2017 was truly the breakout year for 43-year-old Cyprus-born composer George Kallis. He impressed with three truly magnificent scores – the epic Russian fantasy epic The Last Warrior, the historical drama The Black Prince, and the children’s adventure Albion: The Last Stallion. Although none of the films themselves were especially popular or noteworthy, Kallis showed with his music that he is a composer of significant skill and class, and that he has enormous future ahead of him if he can get the breaks on the right projects.”