Sam Lipman, adjunct professor of screen scoring at SDCT, recently scored El Vacío, a documentary created by filmmaker Deborah S. Esquenazi that explores one woman's experience as an undocumented immigrant in America. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and is currently featured in The New York Times as an Op-Doc. You can view El Vacío in its entirety here.
This is just one of many projects that Lipman has worked on in the past year. In February, his first choral work, "Tree Of Life," a commemoration to the victims of the Pittsburg Synagogue shooting, premiered at Carnegie Hall. His great uncle Zenon, a Holocaust survivor, wrote the text.
Lipman's sound design for UT production Matawan was recently nominated for an Austin Critics Table Award. The score, which featured an immersive 28-speaker array, transformed the B. Iden Payne Theatre into an "underwater hell."
In addition to El Vacío, Lipman composed the documentary music to Richard Linklater's latest feature Where'd You Go, Bernadette, which stars Cate Blanchett and will arrive in theaters this August. He also scored several Australian TV shows this year, including Meanwhile In Australia, Wife Swap and Old People's Home for 4 Year Olds.
As for future plans, Lipman says, "I'm currently working on my first opera, which tells a similar story as the New York Times piece, tracing a South American family's harrowing journey northward." He will also score Esquenazi's next feature documentary Queen Of Wands, which has been awarded the Sundance Screenwriter Grant.