All You Need is Death
Dir Paul Duane, Ireland 2024 On general release
Searching for rare traditional songs is an art, but there is money to be made too. Rich collectors will pay for previously unheard variations, but will cough up a lot more for lost songs, so the trade attracts some mercenary characters. A young couple, Anna (Simone Collins) and Aleks (Charlie Maher), travel around bars, houses and towns in Ireland, looking for old folk songs. They’ll even stage mock fights in an attempt to draw out more information, with Anna playing the damsel in distress. They hear a garbled account of a folk singer who has unknown songs, but the trail peters out. They attend a seminar of likeminded song hunters, run by Agnes (Catherine Siggins), who, impressed by Anna’s singing, provides them with the name of the singer, Rita Concannon, and her hometown, Crossmaglen, but claims she is dead.
