When a film is on a serious or sad subject, music can bring a sense of involvement that subconsciously induces a sense of relief. To that end, the trio of composers who created the score for the Nazi hospital drama The Desperate beautifully buffeted Ben-Hur Sepehr’s 32-min. Holocaust film that was submitted for Oscar consideration in the live action short film category and is up for inclusion in numerous film festivals.
Starring Peter Mark Richman (“Beverly Hills 90210,” “Dynasty”) and Greg Mullavey (“iCarly,” “The Bold and the Beautiful”), The Desperate exhibited hostile confrontation between Richman, who portrayed a Jewish surgeon who was pulled for purely selfish reasons from the gas chamber line, and Mullavey, who played a Nazi general whose only son was dying and in dire need of the surgeon’s attention. The confrontation between the two men blended later into empathy for one another as they saw each other as men instead of enemies.
Composers Patrick Kirst (The Proposal, The Ugly Truth, Sex and the City: The Movie), drummer Yotam Rosenbaum (jazz album “Balance” followed debut of “When? The Never Meeting Quartet” with soon-to-be-out “The Capitalist Hippie Complex”), and Marcus Sjowall (Miracle at St. Anna, Souls for Sale, winner of Turner’s Young Film Composer Competition 2006) contributed seamlessly to The Desperate’s many chilling moments such as when Josie DiVincenzo, who played the operating nurse, quickly placed the bloody sheet over Hitler’s portrait to make the surgeon more comfortable and help Richman’s and DiVincenzo’s characters further dramatize the emotions felt during surgery, especially the flashbacks. Kirst, Rosenbaum, and Sjowall have done their alma mater Berklee College of Music in Boston proud.
The Desperate was written, directed and produced by Sepehr who studied film at the Swedish Film Institute and worked with the legendary Ingmar Bergman. Sepehr immigrated to the U.S. after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and today has a non-profit film organization, Tolerance through Knowledge. Derrick Warfel (Midnight Reckoning) and Ramin Rahmanpour were co-producers. On Dec. 5 Sepehr, along with Warfel and Rahmanpour, received the Southern California Motion Picture Council’s Golden Halo Angel Award and Golden Halo Scroll of Perfection in honor of the film at the Sportsmen’s Lodge in Studio City, California. Richman was also feted for Outstanding Performance with the Golden Halo Angel Award.
To find out more about The Desperate and the film composers go to: www.TheDesperateTheMovie.com, www.ToleranceThroughKnowledge.org, www.patrickkirst.com, www.yotamrosenbaum.com, and www.facebook.com/marcussjowall.
