El Mariachi
A hyper-violent, shoestring budgeted Sundance winner that reinvented the crime genre and helped indie films go legit.
Winner of the Audience Award at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival, El Mariachi tells the story of a young mariachi (Carlos Gallardo), or itinerant musician, who arrives in a Mexican border town looking for work. He is dressed in black and carries a guitar case; a killer arrives in the same town on the same day, dressed the same way-only the hitman's identical guitar case is filled with weapons. A case of mistaken identity ensues, and soon the easygoing mariachi is thrust into the middle of someone else's blood feud, and people start shooting at him. When the sexy bar owner (Consuelo Gomez) who befriends him turns out to be the object of the local warlord's unrequited lust, the mariachi finds himself in a whole heap of trouble that will require a lot of courage, luck and bullets to get out of.
