The Sound of the Bandoneón

"Anything of great value returns when the time is ripe," knows the famous old Argentine composer and bandoneon player Néstor Marconi, remembering the tango prohibition of the former military regime. Together with bandoneon tuner and restorer Oscar Fischer and composer and bandoneon player Daniel Vedia, who comes from an Indian village in the north of Argentina, he is the subject of , a lively, melancholic tribute to this musical instrument. This beating heart of tango is threatened with extinction, because it is hardly being manufactured anymore and tourists are taking them home as souvenirs, making the few that are left impossibly expensive. Poor Indians are forced to play on cardboard replicas made of empty wine boxes. An old man looks enviously at a little boy who got a bandoneon as a family heirloom. Shot with a handheld camera, the film is an intimate voyage leading from a tango venue in Buenos Aires to a rodeo festival in the northwest Andes. Along the way, there's a sidestep to the German town of Carlsfeld, where the roots of the bandoneon lie in a factory closed down years ago by the East German police. Archive footage shows how the instrument made its way in the 19th century from European churches to Argentine nightclubs.