Silva Screen

Starring Bodyguard and Line of Duty star Keeley Hawes, this three-part high-octane drama follows the story of Jo (Hawes) and her family and friends, as their world turns upside down by a terrorist attack on the holiday complex where they are staying. Gripping and powerful, Crossfire features complicated characters that feel real. This is a story of survival and resilience, with fearless women at the centre. Starring along Keeley Hawes are Josette Simon (Small Axe, Riviera), Anneika Rose (Deadwater Fell, Line Of Duty), Lee Ingleby (The A Word, The Serpent Queen), Daniel Ryan (The Bay, Home Fires) and Vikash Bhai (The Stranger, Limbo). The 3 -part series is currently available to view on BBC iPlayer.

Nainita’s soundtrack exists in the space where sound design and orchestral score meet with the intimate and beautiful melodic motifs scattered amongst the sound waves. The music comes from within the environment. Sound effects have meaning and are part of the score. Nainita manipulates and integrates the sounds of the surroundings into the music. For Jo’s running up and down corridors she uses Keeley Hawes’s recorded breath, both for fear and as a visceral immersive up-close feeling of tension. Nainita also restrains rhythms and pulses and replaces strings with reed instruments to further deepen the experience of discomfort and disorientation.

Nainita explains “The brief for the score from the team was that they wanted the audience to ‘feel’ the score rather than ‘hear’ the score; not to push the story but to enhance the feeling that was already there; to never over dramatize the story but for the experience to be almost documentary like in places”.

Nainita Desai is an Emmy and Royal Television Society award winning composer best known for her Oscar nominated and BAFTA and Cannes winning feature documentary For Sama, and Sundance and BIFA winning feature The Reason I Jump. Other recent credits include BBC drama Maryland, Bafta nominated American Murder, ITV crime drama series The Tower (Mammoth Screen; Gemma Whelan), as well as Netflix hit 14 Peaks : Nothing Is Impossible (exec: Jimmy Chinn), Predators for Sky/Netflix, and acclaimed Interactive film-game Immortality. Film4 labelled her as one of the top 5 “composers of 2020 who should be on your radar” and Mark Kermode, the UK's leading film critic placed her score for The Reason I Jump in the Top 3 film scores of 2021 with Empire Magazine championed her as one of the “5 film composers to watch out for 2022”.

Also available on Silva Screen Records are Nainita Desai’s scores for BBC One’s The Tower and the widely acclaimed British–Romanian nature documentary Untamed Romania.