MARTIN SCORSESE presents: BRIDES

The acclaimed director Pantelis Voulgaris in collaboration with Martin Scorsese (Executive Producer) offers his spectacular new film, accompanied by a wonderful and nostalgic score composed by Stamatis Spanoudakis.

‘Brides’ is the 11th film directed by famous Greek Director Pantelis Voulgaris and produced by Martin Scorsese. Martin showed an enormous amount of interested for the movie and Voulgaris talents, from the very beginning of the production. He immediately came in contact with the director and together they created and finally launched the brilliant movie which stars Victoria Charalambidou and Damian Lewis among others. The story is about Niki (Charalambidou) a dressmaker from Samothraki and the American photographer Norman (Lewis) in the summer of 1922 in Smyrni. Niki is one of the 700 ‘mail-order’ brides who are being chosen off a photo and come from every edge of Greece, Turkey, Russia, Armenia and all of them carry the picture of an unknown groom who’s waiting for them and their wedding-dress in their suitcases. Some of them emigrate through agencies, others through orphanages or church constitutions. Niki is traveling to find and marry Prodromos, a tailor she never met in the place of the sister who couldn’t stand living in foreign lands and returned home anyhow. In this ship, the SS-KING ALEXANDER, Norman travels as well where a concealed love between the two develops under-way. A romance against the ‘do’s and don’t do’s’ of the era. A much afflicted and turbulent era.

The music of the film is composed by Stamatis Spanoudakis, in his 4th collaboration with director Pantelis Voulgaris (their other 3 movies being ‘The t-shirt with the number 9’, ‘All is a journey’ and ‘Years of Stone (Petrina Chronia)’). With an astonishing group of solo musicians and their skillful playing and outstanding mastery on violins, violas, cellos, piano, accordion, percussion, electric and acoustic guitars, bass, synthesizers and a collection of ancient, traditional instruments like the oud, tabor and santour, the composer manages to create the perfect musical veil on which the poetic images and the touching story of love and intense romance unfold.

This new score is undeniably one of the best (if not the best) works of Stamatis Spanoudakis. Serious and mature, it’s the music we have all been waiting and hoping for him to compose at this point of his long career and he unsparingly offers it. Not long after the first couple of listens, this music roots, grows and haunts the listener’s soul. Essential music it is, washed with brilliant, heady, dreamlike melodies that are perfectly given through a gentle mantle of Eastern, Greek and Byzantine musical elements that draws you away into a journey of memories, sweet and vivid thrills and emotions.