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A handful of recent film studies publications have taken as their subject composers' reflexive and analytical accounts of their own practice in creating music for film. This paper aims to take that approach a step further by exploring both the collaborative creative processes behind the composition of my score for the 2007 South African/Danish film, My Black Little Heart, and the cross-cultural representational issues raised by it. It is often unacknowledged by composers how much a director, producer or music editor informs the final score, and I examine the often very subtle decision-making processes, the constant adjustments and readjustments, that occurred between the film maker (in this case, the director) and myself, the composer, in the creation of the film's music. An unusual consequence of the high level of creative reciprocity on this project was the powerful influence the music had on the structure of the film. This paper adds to a growing body of recent scholarship that sees a consideration of the production process as fundamental to an understanding of music's active role in the creation of meaning in a film; the antithesis of seeing the score as simply music tacked on to a virtually complete film. This paper also examines the way the film uses a number of diegetic music cues associated with specific characters as a shorthand delineation of their racial, religious and sub-cultural identities. I look at the representational value of these cues and how they relate to stereotypes, myths and metaphors used to describe post-apartheid society, as well as how this relates to the film's representation of South African realities. The article ends with a brief analysis and interpretation of the music, its meaning and effects, but rather unusually, this is done from the perspective of the composer, something that is still relatively rare in film music studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]