Evgeny Fedorov, film composer: from the noir Coma to Cannes

The first screen credit on Evgeny Fedorov's official site dates from 1992, when he wrote the music for Rashid Nugmanov's Wild East. Six years later his score for Alexandr Bashirov's The Iron Heel of Oligarchy brought a Golden Aries nomination. The site now counts more than forty film and theatre scores and names fourteen feature films with their directors. This body of work runs alongside the rock career and has its own map, from the late Soviet years to Estonian animation schools.

Fedorov told the magazine Sobaka that he starts from the script. The text produces images and associations, and he writes music to match them. Then actors, makeup artists and the cinematographer do their part, and the finished film sometimes looks different from what he pictured. He added that not every film he scored turned out well.

The fullest soundtrack in his catalogue belongs to Coma, directed by Andrey Libenson. Fedorov put the music on Bandcamp on 4 March 2012: 33 tracks, two of them bonus pieces. The page calls it music for a grim and dark detective story, and the titles follow that mood, from Where Is Cocaine? to Rainy Town, Narrow Bridge. The longest piece, The Truth, runs past five minutes. Most of the others last between one and three, about the length of a scene.

Kursk. The Invisible Mission was a different kind of assignment: music for an exhibition and a film about the rescue operation for the submarine Kursk. Fedorov told Sobaka that his band provided the sound for the exhibition and that he wanted it solemn without pathos, a tribute to the sailors. The Bandcamp page dates the work to 2002 and credits him with synthesizers, sampling and field recording. The single 47-minute track went online in December 2023.

His most visible recent credit is Winter in March, a 16-minute animated film by Natalia Mirzoyan, made at the Estonian Academy of Arts. In 2025 it took third prize, shared with another film, in the La Cinef section at Cannes. The festival's synopsis describes a young couple who leave home, and their escape turns into a surreal nightmare. Cartoon Brew writes about puppets made of fabric and cotton, a material chosen because it tears and unravels, and counts Fedorov's score among the layers of the film. Fedorov's site lists two more top awards for the film, the Sarajevo Grand Prize and the Animist Grand Prize.

In the same Sobaka interview he mentioned a score for a multi-part retro detective series set in early twentieth-century St Petersburg, which he called mystical and ironic and compared in atmosphere to the novels of Boris Akunin. His soundtracks are collected on Bandcamp, and his site gives Stockholm and Tallinn as his bases.