The Red Violin

The Red Violin (Le violon rouge, 1998) is a Canadian-Italian drama directed by François Girard — watch online on iFILM. Samuel L. Jackson plays a Montreal appraiser who, on the eve of a major auction, begins unravelling three centuries of one instrument's turbulent past.

Built by Italian craftsman Bussotti in 1681, the violin passed through an Austrian monastery, the drawing rooms of Victorian England, revolutionary China, and finally the auction houses of North America. Girard tells each chapter as a self-contained story, with the violin as the only constant — a silent engine of obsession, loss, and occasionally genius. The Maoist-era China segment alone is unlike anything else in the film's genre.

John Corigliano's score took home the Academy Award for Best Original Music, and it earned every note of it — the violin's theme runs through all five stories like a thread pulling tight. A film built around the idea that beautiful things carry their own danger. Stream The Red Violin (1998) online on iFILM.