EP released Monday 1 June 2020 on
Blink in the Endless as digital
 digital editions
Available on digital platforms such as Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / Amazon Music.
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description
"I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is."
- Greta Thunberg
THE SOUNDTRACK EP
'The Life Tree' is a magic realist film which tells the story of a Bolivian migrant's desperate hope to save her
dying son in a future where climate change ravages the world. It was written and directed by Paul Frankl and
is part of the larger UK film project 'The Uncertain Kingdom'.
The score, written for this film by Daniel Thomas Freeman, similarly confronts the difficulties of our stricken
planet and tries to find hope, joy and life growing in the dark. Taking influence from Jóhann Jóhannsson,
Swans, Paul Schütze, A.C. Marias and Bolivian folk music, it wraps the images in marimba, heavily processed
pizzicato violin, ragged percussion and cavernous, diseased surges of Mellotron warped beyond recognition.
'The Life Tree' starts with the title track. Deep forest clusters of sound introduce this healing tree. Fractal
patterns of harp trace the leaves and branches and battle the barely suppressed tectonic forces underneath.
The subterranean forces emerge and erupt erratically in 'Sickness II', periods of relative calm stretched
into despair by the unfathomable scale of the crisis. By 'Forlorn' the howling starts. The film ends with
vast off-kilter heartbeat rhythms swinging in and out of focus.
Three further tracks imagine a possible future after the film, starting with the brief interlude of 'Gate', all
harsh angles and instability. 'Prophecy (She Wants You To Panic)' references Greta Thunberg's famous comment
to the Economic World Forum. Here is a world on fire; prophets crying out in the wilderness as a tipping point
is reached and the end of world seems nigh.
Yet the final track 'Walking on the Wreck of the Old World' dares to imagine a life beyond our current troubles,
a time when the crisis has resolved and we will learn new ways to live and love again.
"The moment of crisis has come. We can no longer prevaricate."
- David Attenborough
THE FILM
'The Life Tree' film, produced by Amy Binns and starring Díana Bermudez, is released online from 1st June 2020 as
part of 'The Uncertain Kingdom' project through the BFI Player, iTunes, GooglePlay, Amazon Prime Video
and Curzon Home Cinema. The planned April 2020 cinema release unfortunately had to be cancelled to due to the COVID-19
restrictions.
The writer / director Paul Frankl has had his short films screened at festivals around the world including Tribeca,
Palm Springs, Rhode Island, Aesthetica and more. He is currently developing two feature films: 'Tchaikovsky',
which is in development with the BFI Network, and 'Roxanne'. The short film version of 'Roxanne' has played at
over 30 festivals and was selected as a Vimeo staff pick, getting over 100,000 views online. In 2018, he made
two shorts: 'Gold Star', produced by Maria Tanjala, and 'Dungeons and Drag Queens', a documentary commission
for VICE.
The producer Amy Binns started her career working in the art department on independent features such as Hyena and
Keeping Rosy, before working with Parkville Pictures for the release of their Film London / BBC Films backed
feature, 'Borrowed Time' (2013). Moving into production, Amy worked on studio features including 'Mission Impossible:
Rogue Nation' and 'Doctor Strange'. Amy continued to collaborate with Parkville, producing the shorts 'Shift the Plane' (2017),
written and directed by Callum Turner, and 'The Bris Of Michael Mosche Solomon' (2018), written and directed by Coral Amiga,
as part of the company’s BFI Vision Award-supported slate.
The actor Díana Bermudez is a British actor of Indigenous American heritage who moved to London as a child from her
native Colombia. She studied Drama at Richmond upon Thames college and then at the prestigious Royal Central School
of Speech and Drama. TV work includes playing Itchy Ramone in 'Karen Carpenter: Goodbye to Love' (ITV) and she has
worked on feature films such as 'The Death and Life of John F. Donovan', Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle's rom-com
'Yesterday', and Sylvester Stallone's 'Rambo 5: The Last Blood'.
tracklisting
01 - The Life Tree
02 - Sickness II
03 - Forlorn
04 - Gate
05 - Prophecy (She Wants You To Panic)
06 - Walking on the Wreck of the Old World
credits
Music written, performed, produced, mixed and mastered between summer 2019 and winter 2020 by Daniel Thomas Freeman
Cover photo from the film 'The Life Tree' courtesy of Paul Frankl and Amy Binns
Catalogue Number BE008DTF