The fiddler goes to Paphos

After screenings in Nicosia, the documentary The Cypriot Fiddler will be shown in Paphos on Wednesday, followed by an open discussion with the documentary’s producer Nicoletta Demetriou.

Demetriou is a research fellow in Ethnomusicology and Life Writing at Wolfson College, University of Oxford and in 2005, when she was doing fieldwork for her PhD, she returned to Cyprus to do a series of interviews with elderly folk musicians.

These interviews led to a glimpse of a past life and the realisation that although the music had been recorded and transcribed, the stories behind the people who played it had not.

So after completing the interviews and her PhD, Demetriou looked back on all the information she had gathered and decided to make a documentary on old-style traditional fiddle players (or fkiolarides) to tell their stories to new generations and record them for those to come.

The 77-minute, crowd-funded documentary tells tales of when these musicians would play professionally at weddings, at village fairs and at any other celebration or occasion. But it does more than that, it traces the lives of traditional music fiddlers from both sides of the Cypriot divide for the very first time.

The Cypriot Fiddler
Screening of the documentary. May 11. Technopolis 20, Paphos. 7.30pm. €3. In Cypriot with English subtitles. Tel: 70-002420

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