HEARTBREAK
a film by Jessica Vaturi-Dembo
original music by Ilan Chouraki
How do you compose for testimonies that speak the unspeakable? How do you musically accompany masked faces carrying the memory of a people? This was the challenge I faced when Jessica Vaturi-Dembo entrusted me with composing the original score for Heartbreak.
The Mask That Liberates
The film’s approach is bold: a masked mime-dancer named Heartbreak becomes the silent witness to survivors of October 7th, 2023. No archival footage, no violence shown. Just this character with a broken-heart face who listens and accompanies. The paradox is striking: the mask, which should have created distance, becomes a conduit for connection. Freed from the conventional face-to-face interaction, the survivors’ words strike with redoubled force.
Music as Character
As Yehuda Moraly writes, I composed music for the film that reacts to the images like a true character. Not background music, but a revealer. Ziva Postec and Jean-Pierre Lledo perceived this essential dimension: the music reveals without insistence that another tragedy is unfolding behind the mask. Because behind each individual testimony, an entire people has been struck at its foundations.
The integral black and white imposed a visual sobriety that I had to respect musically. How to find the right tone between necessary restraint and emotional intensity? How to accompany these voices that, despite the violence endured, never speak a word of hatred but only words of life, words toward the future?
From the Particular to the Universal
By removing the singularity of a face behind the mask, the film gains universality. In the opening minutes, this masked family, haggard with fear in their shelter, could be any family. My score had to carry this ambivalence: rooted in the specificity of this tragedy while resonating beyond it. Accompanying the particular to reach the universal.
A Gamble Won
Yehuda Moraly calls Heartbreak a “poem of cinema.” This confrontation of October 7th’s horrors with cultural imagery—Buster Keaton, Marcel Marceau, dance, music, black and white—makes this film a work apart. A very risky gamble, but a winning one.
Composing for such a film means accepting to stand on that impossible ridge: between silence and cry, between restraint and explosion, between memory and future. I sought the notes that would allow viewers to receive these testimonies in their raw state but with redoubled force, creating an invisible thread that connects, supports without smothering, reveals without imposing.
Among the dozens of films that will be made about October 7th, Heartbreak will hold a very special place. And I hope my music has risen to this ambition: to compose for the unspeakable, to give sonic form to what can no longer be said with words alone.
Ilan Chouraki, composer
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