Intrada announces a digital release of Frank Ilfman's emotional yet powerfully restrained score to the 2024 Israeli film SODA. The score focuses largely on strings, always maintaining a sense of identity for the holocaust survivors and how the unfolding plot weighs heavily on their past. A highlight is Ilfman's love theme, focusing on piano and cello solos, with a muted sense of romance. As the score focuses on strings, it presents a moodiness befitting the heavy atmosophere of a town trying to move on from the Nazi regime, only to find the past rearing its head with a new arrival. As Ilfman reflects on the score:
"The score for SODA was a deeply personal project. As a second-generation Holocaust survivor, I shared many heartfelt discussions with the director—who shares a similar background—about what the music should express both thematically and emotionally. Given the film's subject matter and the inner world of its characters, we wanted the score to be rich in emotional depth and nuance. I composed most of the score using a large string section and low woodwinds to create a somber, intimate atmosphere, with brass reserved for the emotional intensity of the finale. The soundtrack features a sweeping main theme that opens and closes the film, alongside two smaller motifs and a tender love theme that underscores the romance between the main characters."
The score was recorded at AIR Studios in London, with masterful orchestration by Jeff Atmajian and conducted by Matt Slater.
Soda is an Israeli drama directed by Erez Tadmor and stars Lior Raz as Shalom and Rotem Sela as Ewa. The film is set in a small Israeli town in 1956 populated by Holocaust survivors and follows Shalom Gottlieb, a respected soda factory foreman and former resistance fighter, whose quiet life is upended by the arrival of Ewa, a mysterious seamstress with a young daughter. Rumors surface that Ewa may have been a Kapo (a concentration camp prisoner entrusted by the Nazis with the task of overseeing other inmates in Nazi concentration camps) at Auschwitz, and the tight-knit community is thrown into turmoil, forcing Shalom to confront his growing attraction to her against his loyalty to his traumatized wife.
