Most recent: Kaya IV
For composer Carmichael B. Castaños, scoring Kaya IV, an official selection at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival, meant looking inward. The film follows Nia, a half-Filipina teenager training in Filipino Martial Arts to prove she’s “Filipino enough.” “Kaya is about mixed-race identity,” Castaños says. “The idea was to embrace both a traditional Filipino sound and a Western sound in the music without being too on-the-nose with one or the other.”
Avoiding cliché meant drawing from his own life. “I’m a Filipino who spent most of my life growing up there, and then moved here,” he says. “It was a culture shock, and I had to consider the meaning of home, which is something I think of as warm and familiar.” That search led him to the kulintang, the traditional Filipino gong. “It’s an instrument I gravitate to, because it feels like home to me,” he says. “With the Western side of the score, we went with the traditional string orchestras and bombastic brass you typically hear in those scores, because we wanted to again play on that ideology of the familiar.”
Castaños grew up with a guitar-playing father and a mother who made moviegoing a family tradition, but never considered film composing as a career. It wasn’t until his last semester of unhappily studying aerospace engineering that a good friend encouraged him to pursue composing instead. “I fell in love with it and am proud to be one of the Filipino composers doing this,” he says.
That resolve was tested on the upcoming Great American Family film Christmas at Moose Lake, which premieres Nov. 15. Castaños was given a deadline of less than two weeks to write music for a 2+ hour movie. “My first thought was: this will be a testament to myself of how well I can do this work without compromise. And I made it happen.”
After nearly four years supporting mentorship and industry collaboration as a Los Angeles administrator with the Society of Composers & Lyricists, Castaños said he’s learned that you build stability for yourself in the profession by building community.
