The film opens with a surge of waves, cutting to hands beating a hot rhythm on a large drum, cutting to the click of claves, to the shuffle of dancing feet, and back to the sea. They say that the accordion arrived in Colombia because of a shipwreck. The ship, full of German accordions, was bound for Argentina when it was sunk during a storm off Colombia's Caribbean coast. The Colombians still like German accordions best, although they are all smuggled now over the border from Venezuela. And accordions, accordions everywhere. To have a celebration all you need is an accordion player, a drummer and some rum. There are plenty of celebrations!

This film is a documentary about Francisco "Pacho" Rada, 93 years old and a living legend in Colombia. He took up the accordion at the age of four and has been playing it ever since. He is considered to be the grandfather of Colombian accordion playing, still very popular in his own right and an enormous influence of on Colombia's younger salsa players. Fame did not however make Pacho a rich old man. We see him taking a wash in the Caribbean manner, with a bucket of cold water and a calabash, and he is emaciated, every rib standing clear from his body, his cheeks sunken and hollow. He says that he lies awake at night because he is hungry, and he worries where the next days meals will come from. We see him explaining this to a younger, successful and obviously rich protege, who at least has the grace to be embarrassed.

Pacho was born in a small town called El Dificil, two days travel away from the coast by boat up the Magdalena river. There he had a small farm, but like many others he was driven off his land by the drug barons and moved to a barrio by the sea at Santa Marta. He now has over 400 descendants, most of whom live nearby so that his end of Santa Marta is now known as the Rada barrio. As a young man he married and had three children. Then he fell in love with another woman. His first wife Maria, now also very elderly, talks serenely about her decision to befriend the other woman, in the interests of them all having a happy life together. Pacho's daughter by his second wife also describes their unusual family arrangements. Pacho was notoriously even-handed, so if he spent the day with one woman he always made sure to spend the night with the other!

Pacho wrote and sang his own songs. His daughter now writes them all down to make sure that nobody sings them and then claims to be their composer. His music is performed all over Colombia by younger musicians and bands, who are often unaware of who wrote them. His hands are still nimble at 93, the accordion music still sets feet tapping and the heart racing. The younger players have a more international sound, aided by amplification and influence of tango and other music from further south. Pacho complains that songwriters nowadays no longer write about reality. All their lyrics are addressed to "her", not to a specific woman. He says that he addressed the largest number of his songs to Maria and it makes him laugh to hear people sing it who have never met her, or worse still who change her name from Maria to "my Negro", which as he says could be anyone.

This documentary was beautifully filmed and lovingly constructed. I did keep wondering how much of it was specially staged for the camera, and what was happening after the end of each shot (and particularly whether the embarrassed pop star mentioned above actually gave Pacho some money. I hope that he was well paid for making the film). I felt unusually aware of what we were not shown. Nonetheless it was a very enjoyable film with some wonderful, wonderful accordion playing.

Henna's Song is a short film about 14 year-old girl who lives in the northernmost corner of Finnish Lapland. But Henna and her family are not Finns, they belong to the Sámi people who travelled to Finland from Russia hundreds of years ago and speak their own language, which is called Skolt. The Sámi have a form of folk song which they call Leu’dd. It is a very special form of song as it contains the stories and history of the Sámi people. Henna's grandparents sing Leu’dd, in fact every one of their generation did. But Henna's parents didn't: the Skolt language was banned for many years and singing Leu’dd went out of fashion.

Nowadays culture is a tourist commodity. Coachloads of tourists from Norway, the rest of Europe and America travel to Lapland to eat reindeer soup inside a reindeer skin tent, served by Sámi people dressed in their traditional costume who sing Leu’dd. Henna’s Grandma talks of the tourists quite fondly. She says that it's nice to keep in touch with the rest of the world, even though she thinks that the tourists are terribly old-fashioned because they walk around in the snow with only two sticks to help them, whereas the technologically advanced Sámi travel by snow-mobile! Servicing the tourists is not such a bad way to earn a crust after all.

Henna herself is a very unusual adolescent in that she is learning to sing Leu’dd in the traditional manner, and is a great attraction with the tourists. In every other respect she is a normal teenager: we see her at school, dancing at a disco, riding a bicycle and driving her snow-mobile. However throughout the film the only time we hear her voice is when she sings. The film is narrated by her grandparents, and by the end I was itching to know what Henna thought about it all (in particular the corpulent American tourists). She also only sings one song. We see her learning this, then singing it in the reindeer skin tent and finally we hear it with a slick studio produced, "world music" backing. Does this mean that she only knows one song? Or was this song chosen to make the film musically coherent? The other background music was dark and moody, suggesting menace although there was no menace apparent in the content or the plot. It felt as if this film had interesting subject matter but somehow the point was lost along the way. Or maybe it was me who missed the point. And why wasn't the girl allowed to speak?