One of the hits of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival was the documentary A Thousand Cuts. Its composer, Sam Lipman, sat down to speak with FSMO in the corner of Atticus Coffee, Books and Teahouse in Park City—but then that interview, among others, were lost as the world descended into the current and unending pandemicscape. We were able to catch up, however, just in time for A Thousand Cuts to make its PBS debut on Frontline in Jan. 2021.

The film charts the drug policies of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency in the Philippines and journalist Maria Ressa’s crusade to publish the truth. Director Ramona S. Diaz followed Ressa’s tireless pursuit as well as the stories of Duterte’s supporters—a cadre of social media influencers who spread the president’s cult of personality throughout the nation. Lipman noted that the film began as a close look at Duterte’s re-election campaign, and that Ressa was more peripheral to the story. “As they filmed, Duterte started to threaten [Ressa] and go after her; she was arrested three times during the filming,” he said. “It got really scary. It still is, for her.”

In fact, over the summer of 2020, Ressa was convicted of “cyberlibel” in Manila. “So, the film took some dark turns. They spent, I want to say, six months out there filming and they went back and forth. Things kept on changing, so it was a difficult film to assemble and to score,” said Lipman. As he recalled, he was sent five different cuts of the film within a month, making a challenging project into a painful effort as they tried to piece together the story. “There would be developments that shifted the overall message of the film, so we’d have to reassemble it over that. I don’t know if we were expecting to get into Sundance, and when we did, we had three weeks!”

Lipman normally gravitates toward orchestral composition—he especially has a soft spot for the masters of the mid-20th century—but A Thousand Cuts spoke to his second love, electronics. “The first thing we agreed on was that this was going to be a gripping movie. It’s not gonna be fun or hopeful. We also had a pretty solid agreement to keep things electronic and weird. Unrecognizable sounds,” he said. Instead of hearing piano, guitar or a violin, this score would be more inspired by Hildur Gudnadottir’s recent Chernobyl soundtrack. “It was my first mostly atonal score. I find that atonality is where fear lives. Is that a chord? Is that a melody? What instrument is that? I was trying to make it sound like the inside of your mind or your heart when you’re frightened or disturbed.”

His score also makes liberal use of Shepard tones, a specific request from the director. The infinite rise of the tone creates unbroken tension and nods to the continuous chaos in Duterte’s Philippines. “This was not a melodic score by any means, but it’s much more of a psychological score. There were heroic moments where it was completely tonal—I reserved a few of those. Most of the film is just focused on the unrestrained nature of the government down there and their use of technology. I think tonality would have pierced that.”

Sometimes, films go through several more edits following their Sundance premiere, but A Thousand Cuts—at least from Lipman’s side—remained fairly intact. Although the remainder of its festival run (including SXSW) was canceled due to the pandemic, its message hasn’t faded. “I feel like there’s a new age coming of film and film composers,” he remarks, “and I feel like we have to be activists and a score has to be an activist score. I don’t quite know what that means, though.”