There is a feeling of quite drastic contrast between the beginning of the film (the flat American country) and the housing estate you show and the cut to the mountainous Epirus area. A deliberate choice to contrast the regions?
Yeah, we are used to hearing stories of people fleeing from Europe to go to the new world and the land of opportunity that is America. And this is maybe not the first, but it is one of the few stories of someone fleeing the new world to find a place for themselves in the old world. And Chris is determined to go back and to live there. He has no roots in Epirus but he is learning Greek and his family is learning Greek. I mean it is cheap to buy property there but it is tough to get there and it is tough to live there and the climate is difficult. It is on the side of a mountain. Everything is difficult when you are on the side of a mountain!
You seem to have a big interest in music and stories around music. Is that fair?
Yeah I guess. I am very open to it. I am interested in all kinds of stories but music seems to have a hook in me and what it is, there is something to film when you are telling a story around music whereas if you are developing other stories, say around crime, we go, well what do we actually look at? What are you filming? Music will always give you some sort of a performance. You can get people dancing so there is something there. The trouble is the audience for music documentaries and the financial model under which they existed for a long time, I am not sure it holds through any more but that is the case with an awful lot of things.
The music in the film seems more important than perhaps music is to me and you. It seems to about life, about remembrance, about emigration.
Yes, with a lot of the songs no one really knows where they came from. You are talking about tunes that go back a long time. At a certain point Chris draws a link between the oldest lyric in human history that we know of and have a melody for which is 1st century AD and that’s the same type of song, the same model of song they are still playing in Epirus in 2017 which is kind of extraordinary.
It is mind blowing really.
Yes, it is amazing. It hasn’t changed and it is not because it has been preserved in an academic way. We have traditional Irish music in Ireland that goes back a long way, and maybe someone will vilify me for saying this, but maybe the connection between people enjoying that music in an unforced away and the music itself was broken, maybe around the time of the famine, I don’t know. But it certainly wasn’t for me growing up, traditional Irish music didn’t seem to be tied into every day excitement and fun for Irish people. Whereas this music in Greece has an unforced relationship to people’s entertainment. They go out and they dance to it and they know all the dances, though the dances are all complicated for each song. Some of the songs have their own little acts, people fall down and being revived and things like that. It is really fascinating and it does have a very deep connection to their feelings of selfhood. It is possibly because they are so isolated and right up in the mountains, the gorge on one side and the mountain range on the other, it is like a land that time forgot.
Does alcohol play a big part of these celebrations in Epirus?
It does but it is funny as it didn’t end becoming part of the film as such. You see it a little bit, there is a locally brewed Poitín I guess called Tsipouro, which every family makes their own version of and every family believes theirs’ is the best and every family makes you try it. It is all made outside of the excise laws and it is illegal and it is really nice I have to tell you. Chris, who has written a brilliant book about his discovery of Epirus which is coming out in May, writes about the first time he tasted Tsipouro and he said it tasted like angels fucking.
What a description!
He has a wonderful turn of phrase. But the thing is, I never saw anyone drunk, or falling over, no fights breaking out. People were eating, drinking, dancing. The Tsipouro kind of keeps you going, I mean, to a degree that some people would argue that it has an almost hallucinogenic quality, it is not like drinking the usual mass produced drinks. It has a strange effect depending on where you got it from and I would always ask Chris about whom the best person to get it from was. He would give me the best stuff which is why I had the good experiences. But there is an element of alcohol been part of it, but as part of eating, drinking dancing. There was probably sex involved as well but I didn’t see any of that.
The dancing in the film has quite a hypnotic effect.
Yes, with everybody in the circle doing the same step at the same time. When I went back there last year to show an early cut of the film to the people of the village, I hadn’t been able to take part in the festival previously because I was filming but on this occasion I ended up in the circle a few times. But bloody hell, it is really hard! But these people knew the steps. They learn it from a very early age,
CinÉireann / February 2018 45