India – Wales: Hands Of Time

A collaboration between Jodhpur Riff Festival, Beyond the Border International Storytelling Festival and Festival of Voice.

It is the very moment before dawn. The call to prayer rises from minarets across Jodhpur. A musician leans a kamaicha to his shoulder, picks up a bow and draws the first note of a melody that has honoured countless desert dawns. With it he wakes the stories of this day, releases fates connected by hands of time across continents and cultures, until a poet in a far off land sings an elegy for the day as the sun sinks into the depths of Cardigan Bay.

Classical Hindustani vocalist and Sufi singer Smita Rao Bellur, master kamaicha player Dara Khan Manganiyar and percussionist Sawai Khan Manganiyar come together with Welsh singer-songwriter Gwilym Morus and storyteller Angharad Wynne to weave stories from both traditions, set against an atmospheric backdrop of film captured on location in Rajasthan and Wales, edited and produced by 4Pi Productions, Cardiff.