Hildur Gudnadóttir never imagined doing anything but making music.

“I never really made a decision to become a musician, it was just the normal thing to do in my family,” says the Oscar, Emmy and Golden Globe-winning composer of Joker , Tár and HBO’s Chernobyl , winner of this year’s career achievement award at the 2025 Zurich Film Festival . “Everyone in my family is either into music or into medicine. It’s nurses or doctors or physiotherapists or musicians. And the musicians are the majority.”

Gudnadóttir trained as a classical cellist from the age of six, but was surrounded by every kind of sound. Her mother is an opera singer, her father is a conductor and composer responsible for commissioning new, avant-garde works in Iceland. As a teenager, she played in bands that combi

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