Dateline: Austin TX — WE CAME FROM ALL OVER the world to this three-sided, multimedia party known as the South By South West Festivals, celebrating film, music and internet culture. But death cast a pall over its later days.

The first fatalities to occur in SXSW’s 27-year history – two killings, plus 23 people injured, after an evidently drunk or drug-addled driver plowed into a Festival crowd – came after the “Interactive” segment finished, but as the Film division stoically continued until yesterday and the Music events still went on until today.  

Most of the Film awards were announced at the weekend, on the whole going to well-deserved examples of that medium, from documentaries through narrative dramas to inventive animations.

But in my view one supremely well-made short dramatic film ended up somewhat overlooked formally – though it received fulsome praise from leading industry lights such as director Gus Van Sant (“a great piece of work, I want everyone to see it”) … actor/director Ed Harris (“Acted superbly, shot beautifully, and directed with confidence and subtlety”) … and actor/screenwriter Matt Damon (“a stellar piece of work”).

Maybe – I hazard to guess – “One-Armed Man”, a directorial debut by Tim Guinee, was just a little too grim for attendees to vote for en masse in Austin’s deflated mood after the fatalities. (An additional sad grimness might also derive from the fact that this intense 27-minute depiction of violent death in Texas during the 1920s was executive-produced by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, to whom the movie is now respectfully and lovingly dedicated).

It is pretty much an actors’ film, probably no surprise since director Guinee (pictured left) is best known as an actor himself. He’s become familiar on TV for his roles in episodic thrillers like NBC’s Revolution and Showtime’s Homeland (where he plays a CIA operational supervisor, displaying tightly concentrated, calm competence – leavened with all the anxious but professional wariness that would be necessary).

His One Armed Man is based on a Horton Foote one-act play – again something that’s not especially surprising since Guinee is also known for having married one of the Texan (well, actually American, international and universal) dramatist’s daughters. That’s not the actress, Hallie Foote, but the writer Daisy Foote.

The compelling drive of the film concerns the unshakable insistence of a young man (played in spooky unhinged fashion by John Magaro) who has recently had his arm ripped off by a cotton gin – and that machinery’s inescapable noise repeatedly invades our senses as we watch him press his case with the business-owner (played by Charles Haid). His case – horribly unanswerable – is that the boss should give him back his arm.

“I’ve a strong sense that self-justification may well be just about the worst sin there is ” Guinee told me as we spoke in one of Austin’s few quiet nooks during “South By”. And it’s certainly true that the owner, referred to by his initials C.W., spends much of his fraught encounter with the inured man trying to justify himself – while also pontificating about the virtues of American business.

“Horton gets compared a lot to Chekhov, and with good reason – mainly for his enormous subtlety with sub-text,” Guinee reflected. “I’ve acted in a lot of Horton’s pieces on stage and on film, and once you think you’ve understood the meaning of a character’s lines, you’ll then uncover a whole new layer, and then even more.”

The drama’s denouement, almost inevitable in its explosion of violence, left the Austin audience stunned and a touch bewildered.

One of “The Rules” in this medium full of rules (mostly proclaimed, of course, to be broken) is, as the director recalled being told: “If you’re gonna make a short, do NOT make a period short”. Guinee has paid meticulous attention to the artifacts and the mood of an American rural industry on the verge of the Great Depression’s catastrophe … and at the same time his short movie speaks loudly to our modern world and our moral debasements with a powerful timelessness.