Los Angeles, CA (Top40 Charts/ CineMedia Promotions) - Lakeshore Records will release the The Bird Can't Fly - Original Motion Picture
Soundtrack available digitally on November 2, 2010. Mark Kilian (La Mission, Rendition) and Paul Hepker (Rendition, Tsotsi) composed the original music.
South African-born Kilian started his music career as a jazz pianist working in and around his homeland. He played with the Brubecks, Shirley Bassey, Ladysmith
Black Mambazo, Airto Moreira and many local jazz and rock outfits and also played a lot of musical theater. He started working in the Hollywood movie business immediately upon graduation from USC, writing, orchestrating, conducting and programming on movies like The Matrix: Reloaded, Species, Copycat and The Animatrix. His most recent film is The Ward with legendary horror director John Carpenter.
Others include Traitor, La Mission, and Before the Rains. His TV work includes ABC's Daybreak and Jake In Progress, Fox's Kitchen Confidential and countless high profile TV commercials for Coke, Amex, Toyota, Microsoft and the memorable Apple iMac spinning color spot.
Paul Hepker was born in Zimbabwe, raised in South Africa. He trained as a concert pianist and worked as a Musical Director at the National Theatres in Pretoria and Cape Town. In the mid-1990s he toured the world as a member of the Grammy-nominated band Johnny Clegg and Savuka, before moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in composing for stage and screen. Hepker has composed the music for the documentaries Into The Light, and Where The Water Meets The Sky, as well as numerous Discovery, Animal Planet, History and National Geographic Channel series including Deadliest Catch, IRT Deadliest Roads, Iditarod and Raw Nature. As a member of acclaimed LA theater group Circle X, Paul garnered numerous awards for his Composition and Musical Direction in stage productions such as Grendel, Laura Comstock's Bag-Punching Dog and the inaugural Boston Court theater production, Romeo and Juliet: Antebellum, New Orleans, 1838.
Kilian and Hepker previously worked together on Tsotsi, which won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2005, and Rendition � both with director Gavin Hood.
The musical score for The Bird Can't Fly combines the same spacious exploration of world music instruments and memorable themes that has typified their previous collaborations. Kilian and Hepker have created a sensitive, yet powerful aural backdrop for the film; their use of flutes and distant voices, over a bed of buzzing and shifting slide guitars, lends an evocative and unsettled ambience that occasionally breaks out into bursts of hi-octane percussive muscle. This collaboration completes a musical trilogy that showcases their lyricism, inventiveness and sensitivity to complex and emotional material. The soundtrack includes a number of songs written specifically for the film, as well as a New Orleans-style funeral march featuring the voice of Inara George.
The Bird Can't Fly is a poetical drama written and directed by Dutch novelist Threes Anna: Melody (Barbara Hershey) returns home to Fairlands for the funeral of her estranged daughter June. But the town has almost disappeared under the encroaching desert. She also has to confront the fact that she has a 10 year old grandson, River, about whose existence she knows nothing. Melody decides to take River away with her but he is resistant. He has worked out an ambitious plan to survive, by breeding the ostriches he and his mother used to feed. River's father, Scoop, an idle musician and the town's postman, wants Melody to leave because he has a secret to hide. A series of confrontations ensues until Melody discovers the truth. It's only when a sandstorm forces Melody and River to take shelter together, that Melody faces some painful facts from her past, which allows both of them to reach an understanding and to begin a new future together.
The Bird Can't Fly was originally released in 2007. It earned The City of Utrecht Film Prize for Best Dutch Debut, and was called an 'impressive directorial debut' by Hollywood Reporter. The Bird Can't Fly � Original Motion Picture Score on Lakeshore Records will be released digitally on November 2, 2010.
