Music Composed by HANAN TOWNSHEND
Ever since he started his collaborations with Terrence Malick on To The Wonder and Knight of Cups, composer Hanan Townshend has turned into one of the most in-demand composer of the art house / indie cinema scene. MovieScore Media the composer’s latest entry for a Swedish picture, Wiktor Ericsson’s Strawberry Days (in Swedish: Jordgubbslandet). The film tells the story of 15-year-old Wojtek who travels from Poland to Sweden with his parents to work on a farm picking strawberries. Even though the outside world would never accept a relationship like this, the young boy starts bonding with the farmer’s daughter as they find themselves trapped on opposite sides of a brewing conflict around the guest workers.
“Hanan was one of the composers whose music I was listening to as I was writing the script,” says director Wiktor Ericsson. “When he came onboard we tried out several different approaches to the music, but while editing we found out that what we needed was a really simple and intimate score. We used one of the cues that Hanan composed early on as the main building block, this beautiful almost elliptical piano piece that eventually became the main love theme. To that Hanan added the sound of saw, which gave the score in parts this almost otherworldly character. The film portrays a sometimes very bleak reality, the world of the migrant workers, but the music adds a dimension to the story, a sense of wonder and magic. It gives the film this almost fairytale quality.”
Born on New Zealand-born but based in Seattle, Townshend’s music was licensed for Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or winning The Tree Of Life before the composer started with writing original music for the director’s To the Wonder and more recently, Knight of Cups. On his latest score, he explains: “The original music for Strawberry Days is a delicate, minimalist score that explores the world of young love crossing cultural norms. The instrumentation of piano and musical saw represent two very different cultural worlds colliding and their search for harmony amongst struggle and dissonance.”
MMS17004 •
Release date (digital): March 31, 2017
TRACKLIST
1 Opening Titles 2:14
2 Camps 2:53
3 Sprinklers 3:24
4 Drive Away 2:24
5 Strawberry Days 2:07
6 My Father 2:03
7 Birthday 2:23
8 The Butterfly 2:17
9 Reunited 2:07
10 Torn Apart 1:36
11 Parents 1:24
12 The Uprising 4:28
13 Young Love 2:00
14 Mystics 1:26
15 Kisses 1:33
16 Strawberry Days (Alt) 1:42
17 Picker’s Theme 2:02
