The idea
The idea for The Cypriot Fiddler was born around 2005–2006. Back then Nicoletta Demetriou, the ethnomusicologist/life writer behind the project, had gone to Cyprus from London for a year of fieldwork as part of her PhD. At that time, she was studying a particular group of folk songs and, as part of her research, would meet and interview older and younger musicians.
Every time Nicoletta met a musician – particularly an elderly musician – for an interview, she would also ask them to tell her a few words about the life they had led as instrumentalists or singers in mid-twentieth-century Cyprus. Their stories were fascinating; they revealed far more than she could have imagined. They revealed not only the stories of individual musicians, but also the story of a distinct professional class that had, by then, all but ceased to exist – along with the landscape and the people that existed around it. Nicoletta made a mental note of those stories, not really knowing why at the time.
Fast forward a few years, in 2012 Nicoletta was elected to a research fellowship in ethnomusicology and life writing at Wolfson College, Oxford, which allowed her to go back to these stories and to begin what would become known as ‘The Cypriot Fiddler project’ – one that would include a documentary and, in time, a book. In May 2013 Nicoletta returned to Cyprus to start interviewing fiddlers again, this time with this particular project in mind. Almost three years later, a rough edit of The Cypriot Fiddler documentary was shown for the first time at the Home for Cooperation, a bicommunal community centre located in Nicosia’s buffer zone.
There’ s something anarchic about this project. Nicoletta decided to make a documentary, even though she had never made a documentary before. When she decided to find someone to help her with filming and editing the material she was collecting, she chose a person who had, similarly, never made a documentary before. Moreover, she had absolutely no money with which to make this documentary. In July 2015, once again at the Home for Cooperation in Nicosia, Nicoletta launched a crowdsourcing campaign to raise the funds needed to make this documentary a reality. The (tiny) required sum was collected less than a month after the call went out, and so the filming and editing could begin.
From the very start, there was a sense of urgency about this project. Many of the musicians Nicoletta had first met in 2005 had become visibly frailer by 2013; others had already passed away. By the time the team were able to complete editing the material Nicoletta had collected, many more were gone.
The Cypriot Fiddler in its entirety – documentary, book, website – is dedicated to all the fiddlers of Cyprus who graced weddings, festivals and fairs with their presence, and especially to those who shared their life story with the team for this project.