Sebastian Fillenberg

Biography

Sebastian Fillenberg is a composer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist for film and television. He studied at Berklee College of Music Boston and at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Munich. In 2008, he made his debut as a film composer. Since then, he has written the music for numerous award-winning feature films and documentaries (German Film Award, Bavarian Film Award, Grimme Award, etc.). Fillenberg was awarded the German Documentary Film Music Award and the Soeren Christensen Film Scoring Award and was nominated for the German Film Music Award. He is a member of the German Film Academy.

About the film & the music

Long dismissed as a crime story by Theodor Fontane, Unterm Birnbaum has long been considered a canon of central works of bourgeois realism. Uli Edel has translated it congenially into the 21st century, creating a film version that, like the original, manages to walk an elegant tightrope between the popular and the literary, and whose psychological motifs have lost none of their topicality in the context of the original.
In addition, a music was created that subtly traces this tightrope walk and takes up this stylistic duality as well as the temporal one. It stands unflinchingly with one foot in the 19th century and the other firmly in the 21st century and does not shy away from demanding passages while remaining predominantly accessible. Dominated by the rich sound of late romantic orchestral music, the music repeatedly breaks open to make room for contemporary elements, both on a stylistic and tonal level. Avant-garde echoes alternate with minimal music influences and are continually interwoven with contemporary electronics. In addition to psychological drawing and milieu depiction, the recurring sacred elements also underscore the strong and at times critical religious connotations of the narrative.