Envision Sound is an international educational programme for composers from Turkey, Ukraine, Israel and other countries in Eastern Europe & Central Asia who want to further develop their skills working with film and moving images. The programme offers unique opportunities for emerging filmmakers and composers to work together under the mentorship of famous professionals.
Envision sound: double bill will start with a master class by Nainita Desai, one of the UK’s leading award-winning composers. Nainita Desai will focuse on relationship building with film directors, challenges of working as a film composer and ethics in scoring. It will be supported by examples of documentary projects Nainita has worked on. She will continue by moderating a Q&A with the Ukrainian filmmaker Olena Siyatiovska and the UK composer Jo Ranger.
In 2020, Olena and Joe were selected to participate in the British Council’s Envision Sound Commissioning Project, which allows young British composers to work with Ukrainian film professionals and create soundtracks for their films. For both artists, this project became an opportunity to leave their comfort zone and gain some completely new experience in cooperation, where the language of communication, the artform and the environments in which the participants have developed were all different. During the Q&A session, we will talk about establishing a friendly and fruitful relationship between a director and a composer; how to organise a joint working process; and how involving a mentor can help—all of this using the example of
I Am Michelle, whose soundtrack was a result of the collaboration between the artists.
Speakers: Nainita Desai, Olena Siyatovska, Jo Ranger
Nainita Desai is working at the forefront of a new wave of emerging artists, RTS- and BIFA-nominated composer Nainita is a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit, an Ivor Novello 2020 nominee and is the International Film Music Critics Association Breakthrough Composer of 2020. She has scored countless BAFTA-, Oscar- and Emmy acclaimed productions. The PRS placed Desai number 2 in their Top 10 female writers whose work was most used in film & TV through 2018. Nainita’s most recent feature releases include For Sama, nominated for the 2020 Oscars and BAFTA, Cannes, BIFA, and winning feature documentary at SXSW; it was also nominated for Best Music at the 2019BIFAs. Her other recent projects include Untamed Romania, the most successful Romanian non-fiction film of 2018, the WW2 period drama Enemy Within, the psychological horror Darkness Visible [BFI], and the interactive video game Telling Lies, one of the top critically acclaimed releases of 2019 by Annapurna Interactive, including Scala Radio’s Top 5 Video Game Scores of the Year and the Music+Sound Award, winning title track.
Olena Siyatovska is an artist and an emerging director. She was born in the Czech Republic and grew up in Dnipro, studied at the Oles Honchar National University (Ukraine) and the University of Fine Arts in Poznań (Poland), and now lives and works in Kyiv. Siyatovska focuses on social relations, human rights, and identity in the digital dimension. She received a Gaude Polonia scholarship from the Ministry of Culture of Poland in 2019, and has participated in exhibitions and residencies in Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Germany. I Am Michelle is her directing debut.
Jo Ranger is a classically trained musician and composer living in London. She is a member of the BFI Network x BAFTA film crew and is currently on the Ivor’s Academy Youth Council and Media Committee. She has worked on a variety of projects such as short and feature films, production music, and artist albums. At the moment she is finishing off her debut EP of solo trombone music. Additionally, she has recently founded
Audio Artemis, a collective for woman in sampling, whose aim is to support and further the voices of women and gender minorities in the audio sampling world.
I Am Michelle (18 min., dir. by Olena Siyatovska)
A 20-year-old transgender girl, Michelle has come to Kyiv from the small village of Olesko in Lviv Region, but she needs to return home for a while to change her papers. We find ourselves where it all started, get immersed in the protagonist’s personal world, and see her family, who accepted the girl’s new identity and the changes first. In the capital, Michelle finds a job, starts her first relationship. Changing her papers and scheduling surgery give her confidence. She participates in photoshoots, dreams of becoming a model, speaks about her coming out on the radio and appears in the media more and more often. At the same time, she longs for quiet family happiness and thinks about a surrogate birth in the future. She faces a choice: living an ordinary girl’s life or to seek popularity by telling her story.
This workshop is organised in partnership with the British Council.
