Benjamin Efrati creates original music for cinema, television and video games. As a child, he was a pupil of the Jacques Dalcroze Institute (Geneva) and studied the violin. It was as a jazz-funk bassist that he began his career as a live musician in 2004. Influenced by traditional music (Persian, Ottoman, klezmer music…) as well as “musique concrète”, he quickly learns to play oriental string instruments (bouzouki, oud, cümbüs, baglama) and make use of electronic music production tools (digital audio workstations, synthesizers, sequencers). He is still a student of philosophy when he composes his first soundtracks for animation.
[ngg src=”galleries” ids=”21″ display=”basic_slideshow” interval=”1000″ transition_speed=”1000″]In 2012, while finishing a diploma in the Multimedia section of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, he wrote the original music for Mirikal, Balazs Turai‘s diploma film at MOME, Budapest. In 2013, he created the soundtrack for the pilote of The Adventures of Candide, a project led by Zsuzsanna Kreif and Balazs Turai, and produced by Popfilm (Budapest). The project, an adaptation of the famous novel by Voltaire, allows the exploration of the Baroque repertoire, combining the use of analog synthesizers with MIDI score composition.
[ngg src=”galleries” ids=”22″ display=”basic_slideshow”]The production of the ten episodes of The Adventures of Candide continues between 2014 and 2017. Benjamin Efrati is in charge of the musical direction and works with musicians Noel Sarlaw and Wassim Halal. Closely collaborating with the scriptwriters and directors, he opts for a modular approach and creates 20 unique themes, each associated with a recurring situation or emotion in the series. The series, censored in Hungary, will be selected at the Annecy Festival in 2015, and screened at several festivals, including the Anilogue Festival (Hungary) in 2018 and the Sundance Festival (USA) in 2020.
Between 2016 and 2017, Benjamin Efrati composes the soundtrack for the animated short film The Fall of Rome, directed by Balazs Turai and co-produced by Boddah (Hungary) and Adriatic Animation (Croatia). For this post-apocalyptic film, Benjamin Efrati develops sharp, eerie and horrific musical atmospheres. The film premiered at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in 2019.
In 2019, he composed the soundtrack for Arnaud Dezoteux‘s documentary feature, The New Kid, which will premiere at the Fondation Pernod-Ricard in 2021 and premiere at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2022. Between video art and animated film, this UFO is also screened at FILAF.
In 2018, Benjamin Efrati composed a series of titles in a rock / electro / psychedelic style. Balazs Turai draws inspiration from these compositions while writing his next animated short, Amok. The film is finalized in 2022 and selected for the Annecy Festival the same year.
Between 2021 and 2022, while the post-production of Amok is underway, Balazs Turai is making an animated web-series for the Hungarian media Oligarchia – Season 2022 by Benjamin Efrati
In 2022, in the Résidence Annecy Festival, Benjamin Efrati started working on Dino Doom on Desert Planet, Zsuzsanna Kreif and Balazs Turai’s new feature animation project in preproduction.