He is an artist struggling to find his identity and is only at home with his music. Music that has influenced musicians as disparate as Philip Glass, The Edge (U2) and Nelly Furtado. Music that is forever pushing the boundaries of modern composition. WHITE MAN SLEEPS explores the work of Irish composer, Kevin Volans, whose sublime music transcends the stifling background of his South African past. Although Volans’ music is always looking to the future and breaching boundaries, he is a man trapped by his past. 

Our documentary will be a journey into the life of Volans through his work. Each stage of this musical journey is punctuated by awakenings inspired by key moments in his life. We will observe Volans as he engages in work or interacts with people - with his immediate environment and the wider landscape. We will combine voice-over as much to evoke personal memory/point of view, as to inform.

Our journey begins with Volans’ privileged upbringing in apartheid South Africa and his awakening to the inequalities that surrounded him. This upbringing shaped the artist, he found himself questioning authority, the status quo and the stifling constraints of white South African society. But always in the background was the music of Africa, its beats and rhythms. 

It was these rhythms that Volans unwittingly took with him when he came to Europe to study with the great German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Once again he began to question the world around him. He turned away from the rigid music of Stockhausen: "Seeing the musicians playing was like watching a corpse - they were so full of fear." Volans experimented mixing African and European music, much to the horror of critics and established classical composers. The result was his most famous composition “White Man Sleeps.” Volans had announced himself on the world stage. 

As Volans awoke to the possibility of fusing musical traditions of two continents, he underwent another personal awakening. Volans is openly homosexual; his realisation that he was gay became another part of his struggle to transcend his stifling upbringing.

Perhaps it was that attempt to escape Africa that drove him to the edge of Europe to Ireland, where he has made his home. He choose as his home a land that had its own cultural conflicts, where, in music, there is still a tension between the European art tradition (in which Kevin sought a refuge, a musical home/adopted heritage), and its own musical tradition - which has its own continental roots and has undergone its own process of adoption.

Volans is happy in Ireland but is a wanderer at heart. His home is where his music takes him. The documentary will follow Volans on the next leg of his journey, perhaps as he reaches another awakening. Once again pushing at the constraints of society and his upbringing.

WHITE MAN SLEEPS will be directed by leading Irish Filmmaker, Cathal Black. Cathals most recent films have been highly-idiosyncratic documentaries: INVISIBLE WORLD (2002), a portrait of spiritual healer Tony Hogan, and LEARNING GRAVITY (2007), a poetic profile of undertaker-poet Thomas Lynch. His impressive body of work also includes WHEELS (1976), a dark, rural drama, based on a story by John McGahern and OUR BOYS (1981) an examination of the abuse of boys in the care of the Irish Christian Brothers’ industrial schools.  His feature films INCLUDED PIGS (1984) KOREA (1994) LOVE AND RAGE (2001).

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