Iranian cellist and composer Atena Eshtiaghi has won the 2026 German Documentary Film Music Award for her score to MATERIA PRIMA, Jens Schanze’s documentary on lithium extraction in Bolivia that premiered last week at CPH:DOX. It is the second time Eshtiaghi has received the prize, after winning in 2024 for My Stolen Planet.

Presented by DOK.fest Munichen and endowed by the Versicherungskammer Kulturstiftung, the award carries €5,000 and remains the only prize of its kind in Germany dedicated specifically to music in documentary film. MATERIA PRIMA will make its German premiere at the 41st DOK.fest Munichen, which runs in cinemas from 6 to 18 May and online from 11 to 25 May.

Set against the vast salt flats of Bolivia, Schanze’s film follows the scramble for lithium, the so-called «white gold» of the green transition. As European and Chinese consortia pursue extraction deals with the state-owned company YLB, the documentary also turns toward Indigenous communities resisting the project in defense of water, ecology, agriculture, and the sacred significance of the Tunupa volcano. In that sense, MATERIA PRIMA enters one of the defining contradictions of the present, where the rhetoric of clean energy is often built on new forms of extraction.

The jury praised Eshtiaghi’s score for functioning as an «autonomous narrative force,» highlighting the way it emerges organically from the film’s sound design while deepening its emotional and dramaturgical register.

Born in 1989, Eshtiaghi studied classical music at the Tehran Conservatory while also working across Persian music, electronic music, and jazz. Since 2007, she has performed both as a soloist and orchestral musician, including with the Tehran Symphony Orchestra and the Iran National Orchestra. Now based in Hamburg, she has composed for a growing body of films including I’m Trying to Remember, Endless Borders, and My Stolen Planet.