This year's Flanders International Film Festival - Ghent is to host the inaugural ceremony of the World Soundtrack Awards. The 18 October event, which will honour achievements in the field of film music composition, will precede a film concert presenting music from Oscar winning composers Gabriel Yared (The English Patient) and Elmer Bernstein (The Magnificent Seven). Both composers are set to conduct the National Orchestra of Belgium.

The World Soundtrack Awards have been launched by the newly created World Soundtrack Academy, which is aimed at organising and overseeing the educational, cultural and professional aspects of the art of film music and sound, including the preservation of the history of the soundtrack and its worldwide promotion.

The festival will also present a film music seminar, at which Chris Montan, President of Walt Disney Music at Walt Disney Pictures and Television, will give a keynote speech on the important role of music in Disney animation. Composers such as James Newton Howard and Mark Mancina, and some key film-makers linked to the studio, will join Montan to discuss the scoring process at Disney, as well as present a case study on the scoring of Atlantis. A special screening of Dinosaur is to close the event.

There will also be a 'creative partnership' master class given by Gabriel Yared and Anthony Minghella. This will be followed by a case study on the scoring of a recent major film.