This Place’s Kalaisan Kalaichelvan is a Toronto-based composer and pianist who grew up falling in love with films, film music and classical. “With the encouragement of great teachers and mentors I ended up writing music for a living,” he says. “As a composer, I work in spaces of film, concert, dance and installation.”
Kalaichelvan, who was a 2021 Fellow of the Sundance Composers Lab, has held residency at the Canadian Film Centre and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. In addition to the TIFF film This Place, directed by V.T. Nayani, Kalaichelvan has worked on the films Flypaper, Two Doves on a Painted Lake and A Feller and the Tree, just to name a few.
We reached out to him to discuss his process on This Place, a queer love story about Kawenniióhstha and Malai, both daughters of refugees who find one another in a Toronto laundromat. The film was shot by Conor Fisher and edited by Maureen Grant. Let’s find out more…
How did you get involved with This Place?
V.T. Nayani and I met during our time in residence at the Canadian Film Centre. She was part of the directors’ lab and I was in the Slaight Music Lab. During that time, we got to work together on some other projects and built a mutual chemistry around how we took in films and our own roles in the industry. We were just two Scarborough Tamil kids geeking out about what we loved.
Nayani eventually shared with me about how she was working on her debut feature and asked if I wanted to come on board as a composer. And that’s how it all began for me with This Place.
Can you walk us through the needs of the project?
It was about identifying what the story needed. This Place is about two young women finding their place in a complicated landscape while navigating the various relationships in their lives. This required us to find different thematic ideas and musical colors to represent all these voices that at once feel individualistic and united as a whole.
I think the big thing we were after was creating this suspended state of reality. Really leaning into building this dream-like world for these two characters. We wanted the sound to be detached from our immediate reality but guiding us into how both these women see Toronto and the lived experiences around them.
What gear did you use?
We recorded most of the score with live musicians, drawing from strings, brass, harp, voice, oboe and guitar, taking very acoustic timbres and warping them in really interesting ways. We found this palette really effective because they take these different kinds of chamber soloists and give them a kind of romantic expression you don’t always hear in modern indie dramas. And when distorted, there’s a youthfulness and modernity in that expression that feels very in the contemporary moment.
What were some of the interesting or unique challenges you faced on the project?
Finding the sound took a little time. What did Toronto as a city sound like? And how do we give voice to all the different narratives that the film builds space for? We started from a more pop-driven place before we moved into this romantic chamber sound that really opened up the film for us.
Of course, when we got to recording the music, we were in the middle of the Omicron wave of the pandemic. So we had to do a lot of the recording sessions remotely during a lockdown. But luckily, we had some really fantastic musicians give life to the music here in beautiful ways.
