VIA PRESS RELEASE | Award-winning filmmaker Paul Duane (Best Before Death) sought to answer the question “Why do we make music?” with this sonic and visual feast, an official selection at Rotterdam International Film Festival. Aside from DVD/Digital, While You Live, Shine will also be available via streaming platform IndiePix Unlimited on Amazon channels.
Grammy Award®-winning producer and musicologist Chris King is a legend, the most obsessive collector of old 78 records living today. He’s also the only one adept at using modern technology to unlock their secrets and remaster them for a 21st century audience. For years, King has lived in a world of nostalgia, listening to music from a distant past. However, while in Istanbul in 2009, he picked up a few old LPs and heard music unlike any he’d heard before—what he could only describe as a “dissonant instrumental played with an uncontrolled abandon,” which hailed from Epirus, a remote region straddling northwestern Greece and southern Albania. And it was this stunning discovery of the raw folk music he believes connects us with our ancient ancestors that would transform his life.
A voyage of deep discovery into the oldest music in the Western world, Paul Duane’s sonic and visual feast, While You Live, Shine, takes its title from the Song of Seikilos, the world’s oldest recorded piece of music. The transcendental tune, carved into a stone pillar discovered in Turkey, remains alive in Epirus, where Greeks gather every summer to play, dance and sing. And King traveled there to immerse himself in its ancient culture, attending festivals and dances and speaking with musicians and shepherds. Gradually, he uncovered the roots of this musical tradition, and answered his own most urgent question: why do we make music?
While You Live, Shine is both an introduction to some of the most hypnotic and beautiful music you’ve never heard, an immersive trip into an isolated and half-forgotten land, and a portrait of a man who has belatedly found his spiritual home on the other side of the world. The winner of the 2018 Spirit of Indie Cork Award at IndieCork, While You Live, Shine has also been featured as Official Selections for such festivals as Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Audi Dublin International Film Festival, Belfast Film Festival, The Greek Film Festival and more.
