Coming up with a musical score for “40 Years of Silence” and the “Afflictions: Culture and Mental Illness in Indonesia” was both challenging and fun. One of my goals, as a director with a psychological anthropology orientation, was to forge a type of ethnographic film that was closer in structure to documentary films. From a film perspective this meant having a score. Many ethnographic films, even today, do not use musical scores of any sort. For some it is considered improper to include a soundtrack as it detracts from the cultural veracity of the piece. I believe that ethnographic films should not only inform the viewer and function as an information transfer about different cultural issues but should also move the viewer emotionally, thus having a more “embodied” experience of watching and understanding.

To accomplish this meant creating story lines that were based on developing strong characters and the struggles they face. To accentuate this character development we needed both an appropriate musical accompaniment that supported the narrative line and the emotions therein. Appropriate means the music was both fitting culturally and right for supporting the story line and the conflicts that are being represented on screen.