The Parihaka children’s choir who resited an armed militia
I’ve just finished mixing the soundtrack for We Are The Giant, my latest score composed for Greg Barker. The film is premiering at the Sundance Film Festival next week. Our other films together, Sergio and Manhunt also received their first outings in Park City Utah. (Update – there’s a free track to download in this post)
I saw the rough cut of the film only fairly recently and knew I had to be involved.
I was going to say that this film is a call to arms, but, the overwhelming modus operandi of the Arab Spring protagonists portrayed is more of a call to militant peace.
A few years ago I was in Sundance when Banksy was premiering his Exit through the Gift Shop, and taking the opportunity to add some serious value to the walls of certain businesses along Main Street, Park City. I was excited when I spotted this early one morning:
Banksy at Sundance – photo by Philip Sheppard
He springs to mind as his now infamous image of a rioter hurling a bouquet would be an appropriate logo for the film. In one extraordinary sequence of Greg Barker’s movie, a tidal wave of protesters brandish long stem flowers, not batons or guns unlike the brutal thugs sent to disperse them.
The Arab Spring is a collective, rather misleading term for a groundswell of national protests that have emerged since 2010. It’s no coincidence that this time period correlates to the emergence of direct social messaging, a truly efficient way of negating the deathly hand of state propaganda.
This capacity to network peer-to-peer has also developed in tandem with phones becoming powerful recording devices, meaning that atrocities are now documented at a mere arm’s length, making them harder to suppress and easier to disseminate.
This means that some of the stories portrayed in We Are The Giant make for difficult viewing. In fact, this is a score I’ve had to compose when my kids are far from my studio. I want them to know that this is happening, but they’re just too young to see it in such graphic detail. Unfortunately many of the young people in the film have no such luxury of choice.
This isn’t a film about politics, it’s a film about us.
People like you and me.
People with kids, with friends to see, with school runs, with household bills, with exams, with mobiles, with meals to cook, with to-do lists, with all the pressures and joys of normal life – except the prospect of imprisonment, torture and death are just as normal and domesticated.
I urge you to see this film. It’ll probably make you angry, but will leave you with hope in the fact that some good people do great things.
I’ve gone for a radically different approach to building music for this movie, it just didn’t seem appropriate to use a conventional orchestra for such raw, real footage. I built lots of new instruments from found sounds, and approached the whole score as a single piece of audio design which morphs from harmony and melody into cascading walls of noise.
This a riot sequence:
This is a sequence describing the historic standoff between the Māori Parihaka people and a huge armed militia in the mid 19th Century. The soldiers were dumbfounded by a children’s choir being the only line of defence that confronted them.
This is a sequence about exile – loneliness & separation (You can download this track if you click through):
Sometimes music & flowers are the best weapons…
People who made this film happen:
Director: Greg Barker
Producers: John Battsek, Julie Goldman, Greg Barker
Co, Producer: Razan Ghalayini
Line Producer: Diane Becker
Cinematographers: Muhammad Hamdy, Frank-Peter Lehmann
Editor: Joshua Altman
Sound Mix: Monkeyland Audio
Composer: Philip Sheppard
Plus: major support from PrettyBird.
Philip Sheppard – new tracks available from here.
