Silva Screen

To mark the 10th anniversary of acclaimed biopic Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom starring Idris Elba and Naomie Harris, Silva Screen Records is digitally releasing the Golden Globe nominated original soundtrack, composed by Award-winning British composer Alex Heffes. The score has been fully restored and re-mastered for this digital release.

Composer Alex Heffes (The Last King Of Scotland, State Of Play, Black Mirror) travelled to South Africa to record vocals and percussion in Johannesburg before returning to London to record the full score with a 65-piece orchestra at Abbey Road studios. The result is an emotional and flawless score. Alex collaborated with South African singing legend Caiphus Semenya who’s voice is featured to depict Mandela’s passing into Manhood as a young boy and ultimately reprised for his inauguration as South Africa’s first black president. With ‘Sons of Xhosa’, Alex’s lush music sets the tone of the film’s opening scenes, vividly described by Variety - “But you know what you’re in for pretty early on in Chadwick’s film, which opens with slow-motion images of children in a Xhosa village running through a wheat field at dusk, sun flares kissing the camera’s lens and throaty tribal singing on the soundtrack. We are about to witness a Xhosa rite of passage in which teenage boys - one of them Mandela - become men”.

What the press said about the score: Huffington Post Black Voices January 2014 “…an incredible soundtrack. The use of sound and music in this film is as powerful as the camera lens…” Film Music Magazine “Heffes truly embodies Mandela with the kind of heroic fierceness that’s all about sacrificing oneself to a just cause, his score making us understand that lion-like spirit with a moving, melodic power that never feels as if it’s part of the past. ‘Mandela’ has stirring force of the best biopic scores, celebrating and making us feel the anguish of every step of Africa’s most important, and continuing walk.” Buy Soundtrax.com “… passionate, sublime, eloquently beautiful music” Alex Heffes is a Golden Globe and BAFTA nominated composer known for his scores to over 70 movies and TV series including The Last King of Scotland, State of Play, Black Mirror, Roots, A Suitable Boy and many others. Originally rising to critical acclaim with his scores to Kevin Macdonald’s Academy Award-winning One Day In September, BAFTA winning Touching The Void and others, he has collaborated with many of cinema’s top filmmakers such as Stephen Frears (The Program), Mira Nair (Queen of Katwe, A Suitable Boy), Catherine Hardwicke (Miss Bala, Mafia Mamma) and JJ Abrams (11.22.63). Heffes was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score for his work on Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom and was Discovery Of The Year at the 2012 World Soundtrack Awards. Upcoming work includes Knox Goes Away directed by and starring Michael Keaton and the limited series Shardlake starring Sean Bean for Disney+

Also available on Silva Screen are Alex Heffes’s scores for The Rite and A Suitable Boy as well as his solo piano album Sudden Light, featuring music from Dear Frankie, Touching The Void, Queen of Katwe and more.