Cortando hierba
2013 · 13m · España
Directed by Asier Altuna
Genres: documentary, historical, musical
Tones: contemplative, dark, mythic
Violinist Maite Larburu guides a journey into Zela Trovke, an old Slovak Moritat crime ballad recovered by the Holland Baroque Society, and uncovers what the song hides.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A violinist excavating a 400-year-old crime ballad sounds like the kind of precious art-world navel-gazing everyone pretends to care about—except Altuna actually makes the archival obsession *strange*, using the recovery itself as the real mystery, and that's the move that saves it from being another tasteful period piece.
Altuna situates this film in the long tradition of musicological documentary and art song, but the formal rigor is in how he lets Larburu's performance *be* the investigation—each note a kind of archaeological tool—placing him in conversation with Vigo and the European experimental tradition without ever feeling derivative.
The decision to let the violin lead the narrative rather than narration is what makes this work: Larburu's choices in phrasing become the film's choices in pacing, turning a modest archival project into something that feels like discovery happening in real time.