Suite (Il Postino)

Luis Bacalov wrote the music for Michael Radford's Il Postino, released in 1994, and received the Academy Award for original dramatic score in 1996. The film follows a postman on a small Italian island who delivers mail to the exiled Pablo Neruda and learns from him what a metaphor is. Massimo Troisi, who played the postman and co-directed, died of heart failure the day after shooting ended. Bacalov, Argentine-born and long resident in Italy, built the score on a single melody repeated with small variations and kept the orchestra thin enough not to intrude on the silence.