Amine Bouhafa wins San Sebastián’s new music prize: what the award recognises
Amine Bouhafa’s score for Nicole Garcia’s Milo won the new SGAE music award. Its specialist jury and published rules define a distinct form of recognition within San Sebastián’s Official Selection.
Amine Bouhafa has won San Sebastián’s new SGAE Award for Best Original Music for the score of Nicole Garcia’s 7h40 ce matin-là / Milo. The festival’s results announcement of September 26 places the award among its other official prizes. For readers following film music, the result introduces a separate route to recognition within the Official Selection: a prize focused on composition and its contribution to the film.
The festival’s dedicated award page names a three-person music jury: president Eva Gancedo, Aranzazu Calleja and Olivier Arson. It describes the new award as a joint initiative with the SGAE Foundation. That specialist panel matters when reading the results. Bouhafa’s recognition should not be attributed automatically to the main competition jury or treated as an audience vote.
The regulations make entry automatic for films competing in the Official Selection; a separate application is unnecessary. They also require a jury constituted specifically for the award and exclude people with direct interests in a candidate film’s production, financing or commercial exploitation. These are the published safeguards of the selection process, rather than evidence about how any individual juror voted.
The rules further state that the prize cannot be left unawarded or shared between more than one film. Acceptance does not transfer intellectual-property or exploitation rights in either the film or its original score. The distinction is useful for industry readers: a festival honour identifies a recognised work but does not itself establish who can release, license or distribute its music.
The festival catalogue lists Milo as a 114-minute French-language production from France. Bouhafa appears in its music credit, separately from the sound team of Jean-Pierre Duret, Nicolas Moreau, Jean-Pierre Laforce and Roman Dymny. Marion Cotillard and Théodore Pellerin are among the cast. Those credits clarify what the music award recognises without collapsing composition, sound production and performance into one task.
The official synopsis centres on Alice, who arrives in a provincial town and works in a café while seeking a connection with a young mechanic, Milo, linked to her past. That description identifies the film; it does not establish the sound or dramatic effect of Bouhafa’s score. This report has not reviewed the film or listened to an authenticated soundtrack release, and makes no claim about its instrumentation or themes.
For English-reading audiences discovering the title through the award, the next question is availability. The pages checked establish the prize, its rules and the film’s credits, but do not confirm a soundtrack release or a screening date in the reader’s country. The accompanying photograph shows the Kursaal in April 2009 as venue context, not the 2026 presentation.
프리즘코리아 편집국 > Maya Collins
