"Whose Is This Song?" - film by Adela Peeva

[Sandra Layman <sandralayman...>]

from:

Mar. 22, 2004

An anthem for the Balkans
By BARRY DAVIS

The popular belief that music is the archetypal universal language capable
of bridging cultural gaps and even of unifying warring parties seems to have
gone somewhat awry in the Balkans.

Bulgarian director Adela Peeva's thought-provoking documentary Whose Is This
Song?, which will be screened this week at the DocAviv Festival in Tel Aviv,
began innocently enough in an Istanbul restaurant. Peeva was out dining one
day with her Serbian-born husband and a bunch of friends from various Balkan
countries. While they were working their way through the main course, a
familiar song filtered through the restaurant's sound system.

"We all heard the song and each of us said it came from our own culture,"
explains Peeva in a recent telephone interview from her home in Sofia.

"My husband said it was Serb, I said it was Bulgarian, and others said it
was Macedonian, Turkish, Bosnian, and so on. In Bulgaria we call the song
'The Bright Moon Is Coming Up' and the Serbs call it 'You Have Nice Hair,
Beautiful Girl.' The song is known to be about a beautiful gypsy lady called
Koshtana."

[snip]

"While I was doing research for the film, I went to Lebanon and someone
there said the song was about a girl from Alexandria in Egypt. And then an
Iranian colleague who attended the screening in Sofia said it was Iranian.
I've even found some evidence the song may be Jewish. In the end I stopped
my research because it was all too much for me."

[snip - for the rest, see:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid
=1079929444454 ]

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