USA Projects

Four years ago, I had the opportunity to go back to China to research and find musicians to bring to the U.S. to perform concerts at Carnegie Hall as part of a festival of Chinese culture.  During these travels, I not only found wonderful musicians, I also re-discovered my own musical roots.  The people I met and the extraordinary music they were making was something I wanted to document.  Although the concerts at Carnegie Hall were sold out, I wanted to share the stories of these people and their culture with a much wider audience.  It was also important to me to be able to create a tool that puts the music and the musicians into a cultural context and film is a very effective and direct way of doing this. 

In China, a highly-populated country inhabited by 1.3 billion people, there is a rich folk music tradition.  In many different regions of China, particularly the smaller farming villages, music is still a large part of everyday life. Music is not just entertainment, it is a way to celebrate, to mourn, to mark occasions, to enliven festivities and through this, to maintain these traditions.  Unlike music from the larger towns and cities, which have been influenced by Western styles of music, music from the remote areas of China have maintained a traditional style and form created hundreds, and even thousands of years ago.

Through this 20 minute film, I wanted to share some of my discoveries with a wider audience – family bands rarely heard outside their own communities; vibrant musical rituals passed down over the centuries; and gifted, gutsy musicians with their distinctive ways of making music.

Being a musician, it is not easy to make a documentary.  But one of the most poignant and saddening parts of the experience that made me strongly want to make the film was discovering how difficult it is for these traditions to be passed on to the new generation.  This is happening in every culture.  In this respect, it also felt it was important to capture these musicians and their rituals in some way that may sadly outlast the traditions themselves.  These are not musicians who are recorded or heard on the radio and these music traditions are live performances that exist only in people’s memories.  This film is a tangible record of this music and these traditions and the role it plays in daily life.    

Your support will enable me to create an expanded film that not only introduces this rich music history to audiences but that also serves as a lasting record of these rituals and the music.

Please let’s make this film project together! Thank you very much!