Joburg-born composer Peter Raeburn wins Sundance 2024 World Cinema Award

Johannesburg-born composer, music producer and songwriter Peter Raeburn was one of the top winners at Sundance 2024 at the weekend, walking away with the Sundance Film Festival World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Original Music in the film Handling the Undead, which made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah in the US. 

A statement from the Sundance jury read: “This propulsive and sweeping score achieved a haunting atmosphere that carried the emotional heartbeat of this indelible film. The journey through grief, love and hope was expertly conveyed through the tender yet unsettling soundscape, creating space for existential questioning and catharsis for the audience. The World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Original Music goes to Peter Raeburn for Handling the Undead.”

Based on the book by John Ajvide Lindqvist, the film is written and directed by Norwegian Thea Hvistendahl and stars Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve. The movie is set in Oslo, Norway, where the newly dead awaken and three families faced with loss try to figure out if their loved ones are truly resurrected and back in their lives for real.

Raeburn, who was born in South Africa but moved to the UK at a young age and resides in Los Angeles, has won more than 70 awards for feature films including Things Heard & Seen (2021) starring Amanda Seyfried for Netflix, and Under The Skin which earned him a Bafta nomination and a London Critics Circle Film Award for Technical Achievement of the Year in 2015. He has also composed the music for high-profile commercials including Sony PlayStation, Google and Apple.

He was musical director and producer of the charity album Township Sessions, by The Mothers, which was created to educate communities in South Africa and raised funds to promote education about essential health issues. He was the music consultant to the 2013 film Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom. Raeburn also composed the musical score to the South African documentary series Mr Mkhize’s Portrait.

In an interview with Sundance’s Avid, Raeburn said they used early sketches of his musical score in Handling the Undead to put everyone in the right kind of “trance”.

“It has this kind of hypnotic spell on all the people in it,” he explained, “so even though there are different scenes happening in different times, everyone feels like they’re breathing the same air,” he said.

“The director really wanted me to take time to compose, which is not often the case. I’m pretty lucky in that I feel like most of the projects I get involved in, the filmmakers are interested in treading new territory and exploring the unknown somewhat, and in this film, a hell of a lot.

“Attachment is a big problem in our work. For example, the producers on my film got really attached to one of my pieces, but me and the director had moved beyond it. People talk a lot about ‘selling a scene’, but when I watched the world premiere at Sundance yesterday, I’m so glad that particular piece of music was no longer in that scene.

“They used a bit on the trailer but they didn’t use it in the film and I was part of that discussion because it helped achieve where we ended up, which was right. I think the process of exploration is so important, and as a composer I have to tune in and free my mind of any preconceptions of any instrumentation ideas, and see what comes from that connection and from the director’s vision.”

Award-winning Kenyan filmmaker Toni Kamau won the Sundance Institute – Amazon MGM Studios Producers Award for Nonfiction for her documentary The Battle for Laikipia. The film examines how unresolved historical injustices and climate change raise the stakes in a generations-old conflict between indigenous pastoralists and white landowners in Laikipia, Kenya, a wildlife conservation haven. The film also received the Ford Foundation grant for outstanding social justice-themed documentaries.

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