Monos by Mica Levi

MONOS—Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, featuring original music by Ivor Novello Award winner and Academy Award-nominated Mica Levi (Jackie, Under the Skin). The London-based composer, music producer and artist creates an indescribably hallucinatory, often menacing backdrop to the survivalist thriller set on a remote mountain in Latin America.

Monos, Alejandro Landes’ awe-inspiring third feature, is a breathtaking survivalist saga set on a remote mountain in Latin America. The film tracks a young group of soldiers and rebels -- bearing names like Rambo, Smurf, Bigfoot, Wolf and Boom-Boom -- who keep watch over an American hostage, Doctora (Julianne Nicholson). The teenage commandos perform military training exercises by day and indulge in youthful hedonism by night, an unconventional family bound together under a shadowy force known only as The Organization. After an ambush drives the squadron into the jungle, both the mission and the intricate bonds between the group begin to disintegrate. Order descends into chaos and within Monos the strong begin to prey on the weak in this vivid, cautionary fever-dream. 

Says Levi: “I really like all the characters, the Jungle, the mountains and the waves and the sounds of the natural environment--the film crew went to places no one has ever filmed in, recorded sound in, at least for a film. Lena Esequenzis did all the sound and environmental sound. then with the director Alejandro Landes and music supervisor Bridget Samuels and eventually engineer Leandro De Loredo, we worked to get a balance of sound and music to picture.  I hope you all enjoy the film as much as I did.”

Says Landes: “Mica connected with and understood the spirit of the film: the faces, the colors, the extremeness of the environment, the mash of costumes, the absence of a specific time, place or date. She's classically trained but can be equally as inspired by pop or heavy metal; she can mix synthesizer-driven music with a quartet. All this brings a very particular sensibility, a mixing of instruments, that made for a distinct, emotional and atemporal sound.”


ABOUT MICA LEVI
Mica Levi composes for other musicians and performs/records in the bands goodsadhappybad and CURL. They also write music for films and theatre. The feature length film original soundtracks they have done are: Under the Skin 2014 (Dir. Jonathan Glazer), Jackie 2016 (Dir. Palbo Lariean), Monos 2018 (Dir. Alejandro Landes), and short film soundtrack Delete Beach 2016 (Dir. Phil Collins, Marisuke Eguchi).  The theatre music they have done is: Opera 𝕴𝖓𝖓𝖆 2017 (Dir. Dean Blunt), Horoscopes (Déjà Vu) 2014 (Dir. Hannah Perry), and Cow Puncher 2018 (Dir. Holly Blakey).

ABOUT ALEJANDRO LANDES
Alejandro Landes was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and raised in Ecuador and Colombia. Landes's first fiction feature, Porfirio, premiered in the 2011 Cannes Film Festival Directors’ Fortnight and won top prizes at many international film festivals. His first documentary, Cocalero, opened in the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and was theatrically released in over 20 countries. Landes was a resident at the Cannes Cinéfondation and a fellow at Sundance Institute's Screenwriters and Directors Labs.