A Better Life

The film's score, composed by four-time Oscar nominee Alexandre Desplat, was released by Nacional Records and is available at Amazon and iTunes.

The score for A Better Life also features a new original Ozomatli track entitled "Jardinero". The song was inspired by the film's main storyline between an undocumented immigrant and his teenage son.

The film looks at the relationship between undocumented immigrant Carlos Galindo (Mexican actor Demián Bichir) and his teenage son, Luis (José Julián). The single father struggles to keep his son away from pervasive gang culture. When Carlos' truck is stolen, the father is powerless to turn to law enforcement, but the crisis brings him closer to his potentially wayward son.

A Better Life was directed by acclaimed Oscar-nominated director Chris Weitz (The Twilight Saga: New Moon, American Pie, About A Boy, etc). Weitz is a longtime Ozomatli fan and approached the Los Angeles-based band about writing a new song for the film. The three-time GRAMMY winning band are also official cultural ambassadors to the U.S. State Department.

"Ozomatli is the quintessential Angeleno band—multiethnic, polyphonic, polyrhythmic," Weitz says. "And that's why they're also cultural ambassadors abroad—they find universality in mixing the particulars of all of their backgrounds. And as regards the story of A Better Life, they just got it from the word 'go'. They're one of the few bands in the world you could talk about "sociologically"—they were born out of a social equality movement—so it's hard to think of anybody who'd be better for this film."