El Mariachi, Robert Rodriguez’s debut feature, sneaked into the 1993 Sundance Film Festival completely unheralded and emerged with the dramatic Audience Award…and cult film status. Rodriguez’s tale of an itinerant musician who is mistaken for a Mexican hit man manages to skewer the action/adventure/thriller genre at the same time that it incorporates its elements to propel the plot. Like a character out of a Hitchcock film, the naïve mariachi is thrown into a corrupt world he cannot control or understand and is gradually sucked into its evil labyrinth, where everything and everyone is for sale.

Filmed over just two weeks in Ciudad Acoma, Mexico, for about $7,000 with a handheld 16mm camera, El Mariachi has the look of a true independent with its grainy film, mix of speeded-up and slow motion, handmade tracking shots, quick cuts, and disorienting angles. Rodriguez shot and edited the film himself, and Carlos Gallardo cowrote the screenplay as well as playing the confused but charming mariachi.

Twenty years after its appearance, El Mariachi celebrates the exciting early years of indie filmmaking when anything was possible. Thanks to Sony Pictures Entertainment for making this print, restruck from preserved elements, available for this screening. - B. B.