Nathan Halpern

Nathan Halpern

Profile

Nathan Halpern

Movies

Will & Harper
Original Music Composer
When Will Ferrell finds out his close friend of 30 years is coming out as a trans woman, the two decide to embark on a cross-country road trip to process this new stage of their relationship in an intimate portrait of friendship, transition, and America.
Emily the Criminal
Original Music Composer
Desperate for income, Emily takes a shady gig buying goods with stolen credit cards supplied by a charismatic middleman named Youcef. Seduced by the quick cash and illicit thrills, they hatch a plan to take their business to the next level.
Watcher
Original Music Composer
As a serial killer stalks the city, Julia — a young actress who just moved to town with her husband — notices a mysterious stranger watching her from across the street.
Catch the Fair One
Original Music Composer
A Native American boxer embarks on the fight of her life when she goes in search of her missing sister.
The Martha Mitchell Effect
Music
She was once as famous as Jackie O—and then she tried to take down a President. Martha Mitchell was the unlikeliest of whistleblowers: a Republican wife who was discredited by Nixon to keep her quiet. Until now.
Down with the King
Original Music Composer
Sent to the Berkshires to focus on his next album, disillusioned rap star Money Merc abruptly announces his retirement on Twitter. After Merc's announcement, his manager rushes to the countryside to lure him back into the music industry.
In the Same Breath
Original Music Composer
This documentary recounts the experiences of people on the ground in the earliest days of the novel coronavirus and the way two countries dealt with its initial spread, from the first days of the outbreak in Wuhan to its rampage across the United States.
The Antidote
Original Music Composer
The Antidote weaves together stories of everyday people who are making the intentional choice to lift others up in powerful ways, taking action in the face of fundamentally unkind realities that are once unfortunate facts of life in America and deeply antithetical to our founding ideals.
Transhood
Original Music Composer
Filmed over five years in Kansas City, this documentary follows four transgender kids – beginning at ages 4, 7, 12, and 15 – as they redefine “coming of age.” These kids and their families show us the intimate realities of how gender is re-shaping the family next door in a unique and unprecedented chronicle of growing up transgender in the heartland.
Father Soldier Son
Original Music Composer
When Sgt. First Class Brian Eisch is critically wounded in Afghanistan, it sets him and his sons on a journey of love, loss, redemption and legacy.
Finding Yingying
Original Music Composer
Yingying Zhang, a 26-year-old Chinese student, comes to the U.S. to study. In her detailed and beautiful diaries, the aspiring young scientist and teacher is full of optimism, hoping to also be married and a mother someday. Within weeks of her arrival, Yingying disappears from the campus. Through exclusive access to Yingying’s family and boyfriend, Finding Yingying closely follows their journey as they search to unravel the mystery of her disappearance and seek justice for their daughter while navigating a strange, foreign country. But most of all, Finding Yingying is the story of who Yingying was: a talented young woman loved by her family and friends.
Goldie
Original Music Composer
Goldie, a precocious teenager in a family shelter, wages war against the system to keep her sisters together while she pursues her dreams of being a dancer. This is a story about displaced youth, ambition, and maintaining your spirit in the face of insurmountable obstacles.
Swallow
Original Music Composer
Hunter, a newly pregnant housewife, finds herself increasingly compelled to consume dangerous objects. As her husband and his family tighten their control over her life, she must confront the dark secret behind her new obsession.
Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn
Original Music Composer
Legendary and controversial attorney Roy Cohn was a power broker in the rough and tumble world of New York City business and politics. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s top counsel during investigations into Communist activities in the 1950s, Cohn is also known for being Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, fixer and mentor. Focusing on key periods of his life, and drawing on extensive, newly unearthed archival material, a new documentary on Cohn’s life will debut on HBO in 2019.
One Child Nation
Original Music Composer
Through interviews with both victims and instigators, Nanfu Wang, a first-time mother, breaks open decades of silence on a vast, unprecedented social experiment that shaped — and destroyed — countless lives in China.
Out of Many, One
Original Music Composer
The U.S. has long offered a promise of opportunity to immigrants, but currently immigration has become a divisive issue. This documentary illustrates how an understanding of our history and democracy is essential to constructive debate, informed civic participation and shaping a new class of citizens.
The Circus
Original Music Composer
Drawing upon a vast and richly visual archive and featuring a host of performers, historians and aficionados, this four-hour mini-series follows the rise and fall of the gigantic, traveling tented railroad circus and brings to life an era when Circus Day would shut down a town and its stars were among the most famous people in the country.
Minding the Gap
Original Music Composer
Three young men bond together to escape volatile families in their Rust Belt hometown. As they face adult responsibilities, unexpected revelations threaten their decade-long friendship.
Night Comes On
Additional Music
Angel is released from juvenile detention on the eve of her 18th birthday. Haunted by her past, she embarks on a journey with her 10 year-old sister that could destroy their future.
Call Her Ganda
Music
Grassroots activists in the Philippines are spurred into action when a local transgender woman is found dead in a motel room with a 19-year-old U.S. marine as the leading suspect. As they demand answers and a just trial, hidden histories of U.S. colonization come bubbling to the surface.
The Rider
Original Music Composer
Once a rising star of the rodeo circuit, and a gifted horse trainer, young cowboy Brady is warned that his riding days are over after a horse crushed his skull at a rodeo. In an attempt to regain control of his own fate, Brady undertakes a search for a new identity and what it means to be a man in the heartland of the United States.
Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
Original Music Composer
Griffin Dunne’s years-in-the-making documentary portrait of his aunt Joan Didion moves with the spirit of her uncannily lucid writing: the film simultaneously expands and zeroes in, covering a vast stretch of turbulent cultural history with elegance and candor.
One Percent More Humid
Original Music Composer
A pair of childhood friends reunite during their summer break from college and deal with a traumatizing experience from their past.
I Am Another You
Original Music Composer
Through the eyes of a young drifter who rejects society's rules and intentionally chooses to live on the streets, Chinese filmmaker Nanfu Wang explores the meaning of personal freedom – and its limits.
The Lovers and the Despot
Original Music Composer
Hong Kong, 1978. South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee is kidnapped by North Korean operatives following orders from dictator Kim Jong-il. Her ex-husband, film director Shin Sang-ok, undertakes her search, but soon after he is kidnapped as well. In 1983, after living through years of tribulations, Kim Jong-il puts them in charge of the North Korean film industry in the hope of gaining international recognition.
Abortion: Stories Women Tell
Original Music Composer
A thought-provoking look at the subject of abortion today, told through the stories of women struggling with unplanned pregnancies, abortion providers and clinic staff and activists on both sides of this contentious debate.
Hooligan Sparrow
Original Music Composer
The danger is palpable as intrepid young filmmaker Nanfu Wang follows maverick activist Ye Haiyan (a.k.a Hooligan Sparrow) and her band of colleagues to Hainan Province in southern China to protest the case of six elementary school girls who were sexually abused by their principal. Marked as enemies of the state, the activists are under constant government surveillance and face interrogation, harassment, and imprisonment. Sparrow, who gained notoriety with her advocacy work for sex workers’ rights, continues to champion girls’ and women’s rights and arms herself with the power and reach of social media.
Sticky Notes
Original Music Composer
The story of an emotionally detached backup dancer named Athena, who must return home to Florida to help care for her estranged father, Jack, after he gets diagnosed with cancer. There she must contend with Jack’s irresponsible lifestyle while looking after six year old Honey Bunny who is only beginning to grasp the err in Jack’s ways.
Out Run
Music
Mobilizing working-class transgender hairdressers and beauty queens, the dynamic leaders of the world's only LGBT political party wage a historic quest to elect a trans woman to the Philippine Congress.
What Was Ours
Original Music Composer
Like millions of indigenous people, many Native American tribes do not control their own material history and culture. For the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes living on the isolated Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, new contact with lost artifacts risks opening old wounds but also offers the possibility for healing. What Was Ours is the story of how a young journalist and a teenage powwow princess, both of the Arapaho tribe, travelled together with a Shoshone elder in search of missing artifacts in the vast archives of Chicago’s Field Museum. There they discover a treasure trove of ancestral objects, setting them on a journey to recover what has been lost and build hope for the future.
Right Footed
Original Music Composer
Jessica Cox was born without arms as a result of a birth defect, but managed to overcome many physical and emotional challenges to become fully independent. She learned to type with her toes, drive a car with her feet, and amazingly -- fly an airplane with her feet. Right Footed follows Jessica as she transforms from a motivational speaker to a mentor, and eventually into a leading advocate for people with disability.
One & Two
Original Music Composer
In an isolated farmhouse, located in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by a mysterious wooden wall, Zac and Eva, two siblings gifted with extraordinary abilities, endure every day the wrath of their strict father while witnessing how a cruel sickness lurks their beloved mother.
The Age of Love
Original Music Composer
A first-of-its-kind speed dating event for 70- to 90-year-olds sets up this comic and poignant look at the search for love among the booming senior set. Over one summer, we intimately follow as ten speed daters – fearlessly candid about their lives and desires – prepare for the big day, endure a rush of encounters, and anxiously receive their results. Then, as they head out on first dates, we discover how worries over physical appearance, intimacy and rejection, loss and new beginnings change – or don't change – from first love to the far reaches of life. Α funny and bittersweet story about the universality of love and desire, regardless of age.
Rich Hill
Original Music Composer
If you ever find yourself traveling down Interstate 49 through Missouri, try not to blink—you may miss Rich Hill, population 1,396. Rich Hill is easy to overlook, but its inhabitants are as woven into the fabric of America as those living in any small town in the country. This movie intimately chronicles the turbulent lives of three boys living in said Midwestern town and the fragile family bonds that sustain them.
Here One Day
Original Music Composer
When filmmaker Kathy Leichter moved back into her childhood home after her mother's suicide, she discovered a hidden box of audiotapes. Sixteen years passed before she had the courage to delve into this trove, unearthing details that her mother had recorded about every aspect of her life from the challenges of her marriage to a State Senator, to her son’s estrangement, to her struggles with bipolar disorder. HERE ONE DAY is a visually arresting, emotionally candid film about a woman coping with mental illness, her relationships with her family, and the ripple effects of her suicide on those she loved.
Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present
Original Music Composer
Performance artist Marina Abramovic prepares for a major retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.