Thanks to Indiewire for including 'Once There Was A Hushpuppy/The Confrontation' by Dan Romer & Benh Zeitlin as one of their best movie music moments of 2013.
The combination of Dan Romer and Benh Zeitlin, composer and composer/director is a deadly one that should not be slept on. Their passionate, anthemic and melancholy-tinged scores are akin to the symphonic swells, childhood pains and bittersweet aches channeled by Arcade Fire. Romer and Zeitlin's compositions have the same heartrending trajectory of hope, sadness and fervent emotion, so much so that the Obama campaign used one of their songs from the director’s short “Glory At Sea” for one of their key commercials in the last week of their 2008 campaign. And so everything that is wonderful about their work is alive, magnetic and present in the magical and muddy fairytale “Beasts of The Southern Wild.” There’s plenty of score pieces in the film that are wistful, beautiful and filled with longing, but perhaps none is so great as the motif theme, perhaps represented well by “The Confrontation,” that reaches its stunning crescendo in the final moments of the film and the score piece “Once There Was A Hushpuppy.” The film’s precocious lead Hushpuppy’s father has sadly passed on and the young girl gives her little voice-over monologue about perseverance, survival, hope and community. The lugubrious music rises, your emotions tremble and much like the spirit of hopeful New Orleans funerals, this lament bursts into an apex of tremendous joy and celebration. Suffice to say it made many of us literally burst into tears the moment we experienced it.
Via Indiewire
The soundtrack is available on CD or Digital Download here.