Babies - Bruno Coulais

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

LAKESHORE RECORDS TO RELEASE THE BABIES ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK

Featuring The Perpetual Self, or “What Would Saul Alinsky Do?” by Sufjan Stevens
With Original Music Composed by Bruno Coulais

"If you were enraptured by ‘March of the Penguins’, wait until you see ‘Babies.’"
-Susan Wloszczyna, USA Today


(April 27, 2010- Los Angeles, CA) – Lakeshore Records will release the Babies -- Original Soundtrack available digitally (iTunes and Amazon Digital) and in stores on May 4, 2010. Bruno Coulais (Coraline, Les Choristes [The Chorus]) composed the original score. The album also features The Perpetual Self or “What Would Saul Alinsky Do?” by Sufjan Stevens, as heard in the trailers for the film.

Coulais’s score to Les Choristes earned him an Academy Award™-nomination, A BAFTA Award-nomination and won a Cesar Award. Other credits include Lucky Luke, Villa Amalia, and the Academy Award-winning Winged Migration.

Coualis’ scores are innovative and idiosyncratic with their combination of orchestral pieces, toys, ethnic instruments and children’s voices. Mixing orchestra and adding contrapuntal themes tease additional meanings and emotions from a scene according to Coulais.

Coulais writes the original score and also acts as his own orchestrator. “For me it’s very important to make my own orchestrations because when I think of melody, I think of it with the instruments I’ll write with,” says Coulais. “Depending on the density of sequence, sometimes I will have just a few instruments -- strange instruments like the water phone. It’s a metallic percussion where you put water on a kind of basin with a tube and a bowl. You can play notes on it, and it’s a strange, beautiful, very deep sound.”

The adventure of a lifetime begins…

Directed by award-winning filmmaker Thomas Balmès, from an original idea by producer Alain Chabat, Babies simultaneously follows four babies around the world – from birth to first steps. The children are, respectively, in order of on-screen introduction: Ponijao, who lives with her family near Opuwo, Namibia; Bayarjargal, who resides with his family in Mongolia, near Bayanchandmani; Mari, who lives with her family in Tokyo, Japan; and Hattie, who resides with her family in the United States, in San Francisco.

Re-defining the nonfiction art form, Babies joyfully captures on film the earliest stages of the journey of humanity that are at once unique and universal to us all.

“The music of Babies was written for a very special orchestra that included a lot of toys, a string quintet, wind orchestra, ethnic instruments, piano and percussion,” says Coulais. “The words of the lyrics have no meaning. The vocals sound like the beginning of human language.” Although the cast of Babies is international, “we didn’t want to adapt the music to the nationality of the babies, but to be universal.” Vocals were recorded by French artist Rosemary Standley.

Focus Features present Babies in theaters Mother’s Day Weekend (May 7, 2010). Babies original score on Lakeshore Records will be available on May 4, 2010.


###

For more information contact: cinemediapromo@yahoo.com