Tag: Sam Blair

I’ve been working on the soundtrack to an incredible documentary called ‘Keep Quiet’ which has just been selected to premiere at New York’s prestigious TriBeCa Film Festival.

The film concerns a passionate anti-Semite, Csanád Szegedi who was a rising star in Hungary’s far-right party – Jobbik – until he discovered his family’s extraordinary secret…

His maternal grandparents were Jewish.

“I couldn’t believe it, I just couldn’t believe it,” says Szegedi, still perhaps shaken by the ultimate branding of Jewish hatred and persecution. “I thought, this is the worst thing that could ever happen – there couldn’t ever be anything worse than this.” –Daily Telegraph profile

This extraordinary revelation prompts an unlikely, but seemingly genuine and heartfelt conversion from anti-Semite to Orthodox Jew.

My soundtrack was largely recorded live at Abbey Road Studio 2 – with Gordon Davidson engineering fantastically. It’s written for solo cello and based around a scordatura technique – that’s when an instruments’ strings are tuned in an unlikely fashion rendering weird overtones and resonances.

The film’s director Sam Blair and producer Alex Holder were clear from day one that the score needed to be unsettled, fragile, airy and peculiar – in the best sense of the word. Editor Ben Stark did an incredible job at hearing beyond my sketches, and the results are a real departure for me. Some of the music from the film is below.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/127153238″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

I’m immensely grateful to John Battsek and Nicole Stott for yet another Passion project that breaks the mould.

Film website here.

CAST & CREDITS

Director: Joseph Martin, Sam Blair
Producer: Alex Holder, Danielle Clark, Nicole Stott
Editor: Kim Gaster, Ben Stark
Cinematographer: Márton Vízkelety
Executive Producer: John Battsek
Composer: Philip Sheppard
Cast: Csanad Szegedi, Chief Chabad Rabbi Boruch Oberlander, Anne Applebaum, Eva ‘Bobby’ Neumann, Katalin Molnár Szegediné