Composer Amir writes score for Oscar-nominated film

Huge congratulations to composer Amir Konjani, who’s written the soundtrack to the Oscar-nominated film The Silent Child.

Announced yesterday (23 January), The Silent Child appears in the Live Action Short Film category of 90th Academy Awards and centres around Libby, a profoundly deaf four-year-old girl (played by Maisie Sly) who lives in silence until a caring social worker teaches her the gift of sign language. It is written by, and stars, former Hollyoaks actress Rachel Shenton, who drew on her own experiences as the child of a parent who became deaf.

In an interview with the BBC’s Colin Paterson, she said: ‘The subject is very close to my heart. My father lived the last two years of his life profoundly deaf, so that gave me the impetus to learn sign language and I very quickly fell in love with it and the deaf community…It’s a silent disability, you can’t see it and it’s not life threatening…so unless it’s touched your life in some way you wouldn’t even think about it.’

PhD student Amir is a composer, conductor, and conceptual artist. He has worked worldwide with artists, including conductors Peter Manning (ROH) and Christopher Rountree (LA Phil), harpist Sioned Williams (BBC SO), Grammy-nominated pianist Vicki Ray (LA Phil), violinist Darragh Morgan, Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick and Anne LeBaron (CalArts), the Finzi Quartet, and poet Ahmad Shamlou. He composed and harmonised music for the The Silent Child using the Braille writing system, assigning the name of the characters and lines in the script to the Braille code, transferring the dots to sounds.

24 January 2018