WINNER 2007 Moondance International Film Festival - Best Film Score for a Feature Length Documentary.
WINNER 2008 Park City Film Music Festival - Best Film Score for a Feature Length Documentary
Fate of the Lhapa is the award-winning score for the documentary feature of the same name about the last three Tibetan shamans living in a Tibetan refugee camp in Nepal. The score features performances by the renown cellist Joan Jeanrenaud (Kronos Quartet) and Tibetan Vocalist Tsering Wangmo. Sounds of Asian and Western Music merge to set the tone for a spiritual and mystical journey about an ancient healing tradition in danger of extinction.
Each Lhapa requested that their story be filmed. Their fear was that the next heir might not appear until after their own deaths. Subsequently, with no Lhapa alive to mentor the children, the documentary would be used to transmit the knowledge to the next generation. Their tales of nomadic childhoods, shamanic callings and apprenticeships, cosmologies of disease and treatments, and of their flight from Tibet during the Chinese occupation in the late 1950s is juxtaposed with images of present-day life in the camp, current healing practices and shared concerns of the future and the fate of their tradition. - Notes from the Film's director Sarah C. Sifers
Joan Jeanrenaud, cello
Tsering Wangmo, vocals
William Susman, piano and keyboards
Produced by William Susman
Engineered, mixed and mastered by Stephen Hart
Recorded at Fantasy Studios, Berkeley, CA June 19 & 23, 2006
All compositions © 2007 by William Susman
