To a very large extent, this is a DIY documentary, filmed, edited and produced with minimal resources, for the most part by people who had not worked on a documentary before (for why that was, have a look at ‘The idea’).

Most of the filming for The Cypriot Fiddler took place between June and October 2015, though there’s also material in it that was filmed a decade earlier, during Nicoletta Demetriou’s PhD fieldwork, using different technology. Archival footage is also used, from the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation (CyBC), as well as from two British documentaries, made when Cyprus was still a British colony (one from the 1930s, and one from 1946).

A number of photos also feature in the film: most were taken specifically for the purposes of The Cypriot Fiddler, while others were given to us by the fiddlers themselves (or their families), or by local photographers or archives. The names of all those who gave us permission to use photos are shown in the film’s credits.

The greatest part of the documentary was filmed using two DSLR cameras, operated by Nicoletta Demetriou and Constantinos Terlikkas. For only one interview (that of Kemal Deveci and Aziz Kahraman) a GoPro camera was also used. For some of the earlier interviews, only one DSLR camera was used. Due to lack of funding, many interviews were filmed using only the in-built camera microphone(s). For some of the later interviews, an external mic was also used.

The documentary was funded by a crowdsourcing campaign on Kickstarter in 2015. The collected sum allowed the use of a second camera, as well as a first edit of the material. In 2020, a grant from the Cultural Services of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, and Youth of the Republic of Cyprus allowed us to rework the material we had collected, and to create the current website. The new round of edits was done by Leda Ayiomamiti; the sound post-production by Stavros Terlikkas; and the website was designed by Constantinos Terlikkas.