Genghis Blues

viewed February 6, 1999 on video

For full information about this film, click here

The amazing story of Paul Pena, a blind blues musician who wrote the Steve Miller hit song “Jet Airliner” ­ ironically, the lyrics in that song are “don’t take me too far away” but in this movie he travels halfway around the world in search of a music he had happened to hear one night on his low-frequency radio.  The music is the bizarre two-toned throat singing of Tuva, a small remote region between Mongolia and Russia.  Apparently Pena taught himself how to sing two-toned from listening to the radio, and even write songs in Tuvan by using both Tuvan-Russian and a Russian-English dictionaries (there is no Tuvan-English dictionary), and in braille no less.   

When Pena at last resolved to take part in the annual throat-singing competition, filmmakers Roko and Adrian Belic helped finance Paul's expenses to Tuva and accompanied him on his visit, their cameras in tow.  The result is an unlikely and very touching chronicle of their journey.  They are treated exceptionally by their impoverished but bemused hosts, led by throat singing master Konger Ol-Ondar, a charismatic man of legendary status in his homeland.  The warmth of the people is so great that it becomes easy to forget how desolate their prairie habitat is.  

The film doesn't shy from the darker moments of Paul's visit. We get his conflicting feelings of being surrounded by caring and affectionate people and yet feeling like a helpless burden because of his disability.  He is also prone to fits of depression and anxiety ­ we learn later that he is on medication, and in a heartbreaking scene Paul cries that, in the middle of his visit, his medication has run out.

His melancholy is a constant subtext of the film, and heats up into a near fit as he is about to perform in the throat singing competition.  He panics upon discovering that the religious song he has chosen is inappropriate for the competition.  But when he staggers on stage, he composes himself and performs one of his originals, in Tuvan.  The crowd is thunderstruck.  In a personal chronicle clouded by depression and self-doubt, it is a moment of magnificent triumph for a remarkable man.

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