Preceded by a short.

PLEASE NOTE THIS PERFORMANCE TAKES PLACE AT THE STEAM MILL.

The Mexican film El Violin, the feature debut of documentarist Francisco Vargas, has a majestic performance by 84-year-old musician Don Angel Tavira, who lost his right hand early in life and plays the violin by strapping the bow to the stump at the end of his right arm. He plays a village patriarch in an unnamed Latin American country where the brutal federales are in the process of crushing a rural insurrection.

El Violin opens with a horrific scene set in a ramshackle hut, where an army sergeant tortures a peasant trussed to a chair. The camera is placed at ground level behind the victim. The rest of the film is a flashback that turns on the quiet old man travelling on a mule between a village occupied by the army and the guerrillas' hideout in the mountains nearby. He manages to appease the military commander with his music while using his violin case to transport ammunition to the rebels. It's carefully paced, shot in grainy black and white and, with no formal exposition, we're left to form our own conclusions about this harsh image of social injustice. The film's guardedly positive ending resides in the abiding decency and self-respect of the old man, who has passed to his grandson a song of pride, self-respect and resilience.

Phillip French
The Observer