Cin É: Can you tell me a bit about the background to the film and how you became involved in the project?
Pual Duane (Director): Like a lot of other things, partly it came from social media. Somebody tweeted an article about this extraordinary musical event that happens every summer in the mountains of Epirus in Greece by Amanda Petrusich in the New Yorker. I read it and listened to some of the music which was embedded in the article, saw some of the photographs and it seemed like an incredible place. That was a 2014 article I think. Amanda had found it because she was writing a book about people who collected 78 rpm records and she found Chris King, who is an extraordinary man living in Virginia who spends his time finding records that are considered lost. He lives in world of, I wouldn’t say nostalgia, but he lives in the past. She was interviewing him about his collection of music and he told her about this place and he said that this is the only place in the world where the kind of connection between people and music that used to exist pre-1941 still existed. This kind of lifeblood of music still exists in Epirus and every summer he goes over there to this three-day music festival. It is not a festival like we would know, like Glastonbury, but like we would know as a kind of saint’s feast day. For three days in August every summer, the people of Zitsa in Epirus return home and they stay up all night and dance for 10, 11 or 12 hours until they reach the state of kefi, which is this state of ecstasy. They are not like, primitive people, these are modern people but they are very connected to their primitive past through the music. I read about all this and realised I wanted to do something.
There is a line from Chris King in the film that is ‘Everything recorded after 1941 is garbage.’
That is quite the statement isn’t it?
Chris is a man of great strong opinions and is a wonderful human being. He is a great lover of Tarkovsky and Stanisław Lem, reader of big science fiction and a real film buff.
He comes across as an extremely smart guy in the film.
He is very much somebody who comes from a working-class background, came from a tough West Virginia area. It is not an intellectuals’ paradise but Chris kind of educated himself to a great degree. A very intelligent man and someone who has a lot of suspicion of modernity. He spends a lot of time listening to this old music and he doesn’t listen to it like I would, consuming it I guess but he spends a lot of time trying to understand why it has such a hold over him. Whereas Creedence Clearwater Revival or someone like that makes him want to puke. I think it’s largely that he feels music had a role in the community and had a role for people and that role was severed by music becoming commodified. And he has taken 1941 as the point that radio took over from live transmission and song being handed down. Chris wanted to find that kind of music in the wild and he found that in Epirus in Greece and when he went there he recognised the thing that he was looking for in both the people and music of Epirus.
It is quite a stark and striking opening shot isn’t it? Was that in West Virginia?
That was Charlottesville. It is a lovely place but for Chris it is hell. Myself and my camera man went there, and we were saying that we would happily live there! It is a college town, it is very cosmopolitan. In terms of small American cities a lot of them don’t have a centre but Charlottesville has. There are thrift stores, libraries, a cinema and it really is a lovely place but to Chris, while he is slightly exaggerating by calling it hell, for him it is a place that he feels his existence has been cut off from what gives life meaning.
44 CinÉireann / February 2018
ADIFF PREVIEW: WHILE YOU LIVE, SHINE
Words: Jason Coyle