We are delighted to share this magical film From a Forest to a Fiddle_Forais Go Fidil, which was first shown to a sold out audience at the National Concert Hall in Dublin late last year. It captures master craftsman Jim Mc Killop making a fiddle in his rural workshop in the Cooley Mountains.Jim, who studied in Cremona and whose violins are played in orchestras and sessions throughout Europe, has stopped making instruments but was persuaded by Zoë Conway – who buys all her fiddles from him – to make just one more so his process could be captured. Film maker Patrick Conway masterfully documented each stage over six months to truly encapsulate Jim’s work.This meditative timelapse art-film features a soundtrack of Zoë’s own score, performed by Zoë on fiddle and John Mc Intyre on guitar, ‘one of the best folk duos on the planet’ (BBC), with the amazing RTÉ Concert Orchestra under conductor Stephen Bell. The soundtrack has since been made available on vinyl and CD. The score features 11 original pieces and songs inspired by the ancient ogham Irish alphabet, where each letter represents a native Irish tree, as well as a new Irish translation of a poem by renowned Dubliners fiddler John Sheahan.This is a celebration of tradition, of craft and of nature as over the course of 40 minutes we follow the months of painstaking work and witness the alchemy that sees a rough piece of sycamore in the hands of a master become a fiddle.