A young man, born in England of Pakistani parents, works as
a composer of music that is a fusion of the traditional music
of his parents and the most up-to-date modern English music.
Concerned about the authenticity of his work, he travels to
Pakistan to immerse himself in his culture of origin and to
decide whether or not to continue his work.
Film in original version in English, with subtitles in Catalan.
Martina Catella, script-writer and producer of the film Pardesi,
l'etranger, was born in Paris in 1955. She studied at the
University of the Sorbonne, where she later returned as a
research student. She studied music at the Conservatoire National
Supêrieur de Musique and at the Mozarteum, Salzburg.
She holds a degree in musicology from the Sorbonne and is
now a teacher at that university. She has the Inalco-Southern
Asia Diploma and is a member of the Société
Française d'Ethnomusicologie. She has written many
articles on Ghazal and Qawwali.
She has studied Western singing with French teachers, and
the Eastern tradition with Ustad Shaggan Hussein and other
traditional musicians. She has studied musical education in
depth. She has developed her own method through song, dance
and the theatre of teaching children the principles of communication
used in oral cultural tradition.
Martina Catella has been a jury member at the Sharq Taronalari
Eastern Song Competition in Samarkand. She is the author of
a second teaching method combining Western and Eastern techniques.
She has published numerous articles, and directs many cinema
and music programmes such as that at Chartreuse de Villeneuve-Avignon
and the cinema programme at the Popular Music Festival in
Florence. She acts as advisor to the Suoni del Mondo Film
Festival at Bologna University
Martina Catella has created a new kind of travelling musical
ceremony which she has taken to the Festival de l'Imaginaire,
the Lucerne Festival, the Musée de l'Homme in Paris
and elsewhere.
She has directed numerous audiovisual projects, many of which
have been for television, concerning both Eastern and Western
classical music. These include a programme on the pianist
Maria José Pires (1984) and the ethnographic documentaries
Même les pierres nous entendent (1990) and Pardesi,
l'‚étranger (1991-2). Among the discs recorded
by Martina Catella are Le Qawwali, expression de l'Essentiel
Désir (1994) and Liturgies musicales du Panjab Pakistanais
(1997).
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