SheTrades - The Bee Queen

An initiative about female empowerment and a honey producer gave me ample to play with.

Anslema has a magical quality about her and a rich symbiosis with her bees.

Oboes are good at creating a sense of the strange, slightly reptilian or insectlike, but here they aim to be non-threatening. I've layered it with a slightly ailen sounding choir - this is the voice of the bees talking to Anselma. The choir doesn't sing words as such, mainly single syllables, so it's almost human but it doesn't have a set vocabulary. Augmented with sprinkles of tambourine, a cable tie being closed, occasionally punctuating the air like buzzing wings, we wanted to create a sense of both animal and human energies intertwining.

Layering instruments of the region give it a sense of place: marimba, guitars, maracas, conch. But glueing it together is a larger choir.

There is a strong sense of community to this set of films, so it seemed appropriate for a female choir to be the common element that ties them together - there is an identical vocal section in both, but only for a moment - the sound converges for a few seconds and then each track goes its separate way.