Small Path Music - Feature documentary film
Producer / Director. 2013
In the hills and plateaus of Southeast Asia Laurent Jeanneau has found music which speaks to him like nothing else.
Travelling to these hard-to-reach places, amongst people for whom the thread of tradition has not been broken, in search of new discoveries is motivated by his his passion for the music and sounds he finds. A passion which has grown to be his work and his life.
From shamanic rituals to love songs, historical epics to lamentations, his microphones become our ears - and through the window of his work we glimpse the lives of the artists he records,
Recently played : Immagini e Suoni del Mondo Film Festival - Florence, Italy.
Available on DVD released by Sublime Records
Small Path Music takes us travelling in the field with Laurent, exploring the lesser-travelled mountains of Northern Laos and into the borderlands of Yunnan, China. With his fiercely independent spirit as his compass we follow him garnering clues from locals and experiencing the practicalities of his work in “remote” areas as we accompany him on his quest to record "old-style" traditional music and songs.
Through the lens we witness the lives of these musicians, and the world they live in. Recorded in their natural setting we witness these performances as part of the living, breathing cultural life of the communities he visits.
Laurent recounts experiences of a decade recording in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and China and we gauge his perspective on the musical traditions of this area. We see how he relates to them and how his work has led his life in new directions. Through his work he met his wife, Tanding and together they established a recording label (Kink Gong) to release their field recordings.
In an area with such ethnic and cultural diversity there is still plenty of recording work to be done. However with the increasing interaction of these regions beyond the social horizons of old, Small Path Music frames the changing situation in which Laurent finds these arts today. And the urgency of this work becomes apparent.