I’ve recently finished the sound design for a new film, A Thousand Fires — by director Saeed Taji Farouky. It is a visceral, temporal portrayal of life in the Magway region of Myanmar — I have loved working with Saeed on it.
Here is a short excerpt from an article written by The Film Stage about the film following a viewing at the 2021 Locarno Film Festival, where it won the Marco Zucchi Award.
What makes A Thousand Fires stand out is Farouky’s ability to yoke the drama to the substance around which their lives gravitate. Underpinning the film is a Herzogian interest in the way oil drilling works, warts and all; time and again we watch Thein Shwe operate his makeshift derrick, scavenging for crude sixteen meters underground. In Farouky’s hands, the act itself acquires a certain nobility, a sacred beauty that’s amplified by Fatima Dunn’s score and Maxence Ciekawy and James Bulley’s sound design. Watching Thein Shwe pound the ground with his pole, I wondered if what I was looking at wasn’t a man digging, but plugging cables to a beating heart chugging somewhere below the Earth’s surface. Forsaking any vague, abstract statements on “the industry,” A Thousand Fires stays small, focusing instead on the connection between oil and the human body—the tactile, painful efforts to dig up the remnants of millions of years of sedimented histories. It’s a beguiling, epic journey.
More information will be available on the public release of A Thousand Fires soon.
