Maxance Vincent
The sound design of Óliver Laxe‘s Sirāt is the year’s best, and it’s no surprise that the all-female sound team received an Academy Award nomination for their work on the film. Reflecting on the nomination they’ve received, supervising sound editor Laia Casanovas tells Awards Radar that being recognized at this scale is a dream come true and was an overwhelmingly emotional moment for her and the rest of the team.
For the team, comprised of Casanovas, Amanda Villavieja, and Yasmina Praderas, it is a milestone because they made history as the first all-female sound team nominated for the Best Sound award. And the process of working on the project with such an intricate soundscape took a very long time, as Casanovas explains:
“It took about nine months. There were pauses between, because we worked on trial and error, and also back and forth to the editing room and to Kangding Ray, the composer. We were working very closely with him to find a suitable pace for the movie and its own style. We had the luxury of having more time than usual, thanks to the producers, just to work in an emotional way. We needed to feel the movie and take all the decisions from our bodies, not our minds. That required a little bit of time to process all of the ideas that we had.”
The collaboration between the sound team and composer David Letellier (Kangding Ray) was also “very close. It was inspiring work in that way. When I heard the powerful bass in the music, it inspired me to also have it in the atmosphere, in the roar of the winds, and on the tracks through the desert. We wanted to attain a balance between the music and the sound, just to have that feeling that, to me, mesmerizes the audience a little bit, where you don’t know when the music starts, and the sound design starts.”
In terms of their work with the director, Casanovas explains that the experience “was special because we were not only talking about the narrative, we were talking about the emotion, and how the sound impacts our emotion. It was a more spiritual way of working, and I think that was so enriching because we were not concerned with explaining things through sound. Instead, we were concerned to make the audience feel the sound. The sound is not only heard, but also felt. We work a lot with textures to find the balance and measure the textures that the image has, like the grain in the 16mm footage to have that kind of distortion in the sound and a hypnotic experience with the film.”
Of course, there was a lot more to talk about in our wide-ranging conversation on the film, including how the sound design reflects the emotional journey that the characters embark, the contrast between the music and ambient soundscapes, and what she reflects the most of the time spent on crafting the sounds of such a unique movie like Sirāt.
Listen to the full conversation below:
[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]
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