LOUXOR / LUXOR (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

 

LOUXOR / LUXOR (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Director Zeina Dura

Music composed by Nascuy Linares

Label Plaza Mayor Company Ltd

Selection Sundance

When British aid worker Hana returns to th ancient city of Luxor, she comes across Sultan, a talented archeologist and former lover. As she wanders, haunted by the familiar place, she struggles to reconcile the choices of the past with the uncertainty of the present.

Luxor Ost on Spotify

The unsettling darkness of our times made me want to write this story set in a place which is a monument to past civilisations whose central beliefs, temples and obsession with the afterlife, were all rooted deeply in the idea of light overcoming darkness. I then started to think about a time when things seemed simpler and I questioned whether that was because of one’s youth/naïveté or because the world was in a place that seemed more hopeful, moving in a direction that was more just. For me, that period when things seemed simpler was in my early twenties. Then I began to think about the idea of meeting someone twenty years later who you were once close to, in love with, and hopeful with, and it seemed like it would be a good way to explore this theme.

Luxor Ost on Apple Music

That way you would be able to directly see this passing of time and where it has brought you or what choices you made and how they shaped your life. I sense (and I’m sure most people do) a great confusion and a lot of fear with the rise of the far right, the questions that are raised by our inability to control or understand where technology is taking us like the internet, questions about controlling it and censorship, and the instability of division and war. Hana is a character who has put herself at the forefront of the instability by working as a surgeon at a clinic on the Syrian border. She is exhausted after her post, the struggle between life and death that she saw on a daily basis has taken its toll. The pain that she carries after witnessing these atrocities, first hand, weighs her down and of course makes her ask a lot of existential questions. She is also a woman in her early forties and her own window to be a mother is closing. Luxor is a city of archeology. The excavation of the ancient sites is so similar to psychoanalysis and works in a very visual way, the digging up, the excavation.

Luxor Ost on Soundcloud