How This Folk Jazz Duo Found Forgotten French Lyrics to 'I'll Be Seeing You', Then Launched an Award-Winning Short Film
Elise & Tobi.
The Swedish folk jazz duo — Elise & Tobi — just released their award-winning music video Je te verrai, which is the French translation based off of the American classic song from 1938, “I’ll Be Seeing You”.
The backstory is quite interesting, however. They discovered a French translation of “I’ll Be Seeing You” from 1945 and found that the French lyrics had been forgotten. A recording of the song was nowhere to be found, even though they found clear evidence that “Je te verrai” was extremely popular when it was first released in the 1940s.
In order to ”give the song back” to France, they decided to make a new recording of it. The short film was made to reinforce the song’s message and to put it in today’s context.
Apart from winning “Best Music Video” at Toronto Indie Shorts, the film has also been selected for the Montreal Independent Film Festival and has already been screened at the Berlin Short Film Festival.
They also recorded the original song, “I'll Be Seeing You”, which will be released as a part of their album this fall.
Elise & Tobi combine music production with film-making. Their first project together was a short film that was awarded the first prize in a Dutch film competition organized by the Heimans and Thijsse Foundation in Amsterdam. Between 2014 and 2016, Elise & Tobi were the producers, photographers, screenwriters and music composers of the documentary An Axe and a Blade of Grass, which was broadcasted twice on Dutch national television. The film music was written by Elise & Tobi and performed by them, as well as the internationally renowned Swedish baroque orchestra REbaroque and the Stockholm-based chamber choir Adolf Fredriks kyrkas kammarkör. In 2019 the duo released their first album, Tales of the Cobblestone, a musical tribute to the street as a public space and the people who roam it.
In the summer of 2020, Elise & Tobi had planned a tour in Paris, which had to be canceled due to the pandemic. Instead, they built a mobile scene on wheels where they gave a concert tour in multiple locations on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea.
Listen to this episode of the Classical Post podcast as we discuss the release of their music video, where they find inspiration as artists, and how they approach life.
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