Bushnaq’s own path into cinema began with The Curve, directed by the late Rifqi Assaf. It was his first feature film and her first feature score. “He opened the door of cinema for me,” she says. Since then, her work has stretched across Arab and international productions, including Yunan (2025), Hanging Gardens (2022), and Flight 404 (2024), all of which she names among the films closest to her. She also points to Al Batal (2025) among her television work and Secret World of Sound (2024), narrated by David Attenborough, as one of the projects she considers a major career achievement.
Long before any of those credits, however, Bushnaq was already composing. She started playing piano at five and began writing her own music as a teenager, but it was while studying composition at university that she discovered film music as a possible career. An assignment analysing Gabriel Yared’s score for The Talented Mr. Ripley proved decisive.
“It was easy to receive for any listener, regardless of their musical background, but at the same time complex enough to have musical intelligence,” she says of the score. That balance has remained central to her own approach: music that is sophisticated without becoming inaccessible, and that ultimately serves the film rather than drawing attention to itself.
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Suad Bushnaq | سعاد بشناق (@musicbysuada)
A post shared by Suad Bushnaq | سعاد بشناق (@musicbysuada)
Being a woman in that profession has occasionally meant confronting assumptions about what a woman in music is supposed to do. Earlier in her career, Bushnaq says people would often hear that she worked in music and assume she was a singer. “I would say, ‘No, I’m a composer.’ They would ask, ‘So you sing?’ And I’d say, ‘No, I write music for orchestras.’”
Still, she is careful not to frame her career in Arab cinema as one defined by discrimination. “In the Arab world, I never felt discriminated against because I was a woman, and I was never favoured because I was a woman either,” she says. Directors and producers, she adds, approached her because they liked her work.
Meanwhile, motherhood brought a different kind of pressure. Bushnaq remembers beginning her career while eight months pregnant and keeping the pregnancy private, as well as avoiding mentioning when her son was sick. “When you say you’re a mother, sometimes people assume your priorities are different and that you’re not professional,” she notes.
But she is careful to distinguish that experience from her work in the Arab world, where she says motherhood never affected how collaborators viewed her. The moment that stayed with her instead came while working with American women filmmakers who were mothers themselves. For Bushnaq, the issue is less motherhood itself than the assumptions attached to it, assumptions she says she encountered more clearly outside the Arab industry than within it.
After more than a decade in the industry, her advice to younger composers is straightforward: do not enter the profession expecting fame, and do not mistake composition for an opportunity to impose yourself on a film.
Or as she says, “The good work, the work made with precision, is what will eventually make your name known.”
© All rights reserved. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached, or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Mille World
