Between Baza, Granada, and Los Angeles (California) there are many worlds away. Anele Onyekwere He grew up learning to reduce the gap between the two points. His parents had a video store in the town where he grew up and little Anele got fed up with watching movies of all kinds, unconsciously feeding a dream. Since he was good at music, He went to study in Granada. From there to Madrid and from Madrid to Hollywood, where he has lived since 2013 as a music editor, producer and composer. On December 16, they gave him an Emmy. He is already the second.
Onyekwere, 46 years old, son of a Grenadine and a Nigerian, is nothing short of a scholar of his own. He has worked with Damien Chazelle on La La Land and with Juan José Campanella in The Secret in Their Eyes. He is also executive producer and supervisor of soundtracks and musical edition by Marvel Studios. For them she has played music Avengers: Endgame, Thor: Ragnarok, Doctor Strange o Black Panther, to name a few from a long list. But he recognizes that outside of his town almost no one knows him.
“The work of music editing is very unknown and undervalued,” he says. «If it is well done you should not notice anything, that is why it is very difficult to evaluate it». Still, Onyekwere has managed to touch the sky a couple of times. The first Emmy – “The biggest thing I can aspire to in my profession” – was given to him in 2022 for Moon Knight, the miniseries created for Disney+. The second one arrived in December I am Groota series of Marvel animated shorts about the character created by Stan Lee in 1960.
“I thought we had no chance,” he recalls. «We competed with a series of Star Trek and other very large projects. Ours was a three-minute short that took us six months of work. It is true that there is pleasure in simplicity, but reaching that simplicity was a very long research process.
The path to Hollywood was not easy or paved either. He first had to find a life in Madrid after finishing his studies at the Superior Conservatory of Music. There he met Federico Jusid, the Argentine pianist and composer, and together they made a bag of T.V. series: Gran Reserva, The mysteries of Laura o Charles, King Emperor. «My work began to explode, and shortly after we were offered to do The Secret in Their Eyeswith Campanella”.