Opening a Space for the Audience: A Dialogue with Kamran Rastegar about Composing MENA Cinema Soundtracks

This article is an edited transcript of a dialogue between the comparative literature professor, musician and composer Kamran Rastegar and film scholar Shohini Chaudhuri. While existing interviews and analysis on film composing largely focus on Hollywood practice, this dialogue provides new insights from Rastegar’s experiences of composing soundtracks for independent Middle Eastern cinema – specifically, his collaboration with the Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir. It explores his musical training and background, his roles as composer, music supervisor and musician, the process of film composing, approaches to music in film scholarship, and sound-image relations and musical choices in Jacir’s films Like Twenty Impossibles (2003), Salt of this Sea (2008) and When I Saw You (2012).