Paul Duane – While You Live, Shine #IFFR2019

February 6, 2019

Paul Duane - While You Live, Shine #IFFR2019 fredfilmradio

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PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews Paul Duane, director of the documentary While You Live, Shine.

An interview with Paul Duane, director of the documentary While You Live, Shine, from the 2019 International Film Festival Rotterdam. Here, Duane describes his film as being about “longing and finding something different than what you have”; in this case, it is about finding it through music and, specifically, it is about how American musicologist Chris King found it in his discovery of the music of Epirus in Northern Greece, one of the oldest forms of Western music. The film is an emotional journey, as Duane travels with King to find out more about this music and the culture that inspired it. In our chat, we talk about how Duane met King and how the Greek village reacted the making of the film, and more.

While You Live, Shine: This documentary takes us back to one of the oldest forms of Western music, using Chris King’s collection of 78 RPM LPs. King is an American music expert fascinated by early recordings of melancholy blues and folk from the start of the twentieth century. One of his favourites: the sad violin music of Greek Alexis Zoumbas, who emigrated to New York in 1910. It doesn’t get any better. “Everything recorded after 1949 is rubbish”, King opines. Duane’s title derives from the Seikilos song, the world’s oldest recorded piece of music, from Greece. The transcendental music carved into the stone remains alive in Epirus, where Greeks gather every summer to play, dance and sing. King travels there to experience the enchanting phenomenon that rekindles his love for this art form.