The composer talks developing the score for a Black roller skating culture doc — and his hopes for solving Hollywood’s equity problem.
By Sameer Rao
April 27, 2018
“United Skates,” a documentary that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last Thursday (April 19), tours the country to explore how roller skating — complete with wood-floored rinks and choreographed moves — flourishes as a passionate subculture in Black communities. The film, which highlights the ongoing struggle to protect rinks from financial woes or arbitrary police crackdowns, receives an extra push from its heavy hip hop score.
That music comes from Jongnic Bontemps, a composer whose signature mix of hip hop and classical themes emphasizes the historical links that “United Skates” draws between this long-standing subculture and hip hop. The former Sundance Lab fellow, who grew up in Brooklyn and Long Island before studying music at Yale University and the University of Southern California, brought a similar combination of rap and orchestral themes to a previous high-profile project: the score for the 2016 skateboarding-focused drama, “The Land.”
Colorlines spoke to Bontemps about his entry into film composition, the inspiration behind the “United Skates” score and his hopes for racial equity in his part of the industry: http://bit.ly/2I5FtG7.
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