Fri. Aug. 13

 My friend and former colleague at the Globe, Elijah Wald, is one of this country's best musicologists, searching out all sorts of obscure sounds and genres - old and new - and making sense of them for modern readers. He even took on the myth of the Beatles with "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music." Wald has spent a lot of time in Europe recently - no, not escaping angry Beatles fans - but is back in his native environs. He e-mails us that on Friday Aug. 13 at 7 he "will be introducing and answering questions about 'Al Otro Lado/To the Other Side,' a documentary film partly inspired by my book 'Narcocorrido: A Journey Into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas,' at the ICA, leading off a three-film series dedicated to world music.

"The director, Natalia Almada, wanted to make a film that would use corridos as a way of drawing viewers into the broader problems facing Sinaloans, which have led to the state being the center of the Mexican drug traffic and a major source of immigrants to the United States. We spent several weeks traveling around Sinaloa together, interviewing musicians and filming concerts, market musicians, and a young man who ended up being the film's central figure--a corrido composer who eventually traded a song to a coyote in return for being smuggled into the U.S.

"If I can take some credit for the seminal idea and interviews, the finished film is very much Natalia's vision, and she did an amazing job. Winner of a Sundance prize for her first short film, she is an inspired and incredibly hardworking director, and assembled a crew led by Chuy Chavez, one of the finest young Mexican cinematographers. (If you saw "Me and You and Everyone We Know," that was Chuy's work, and won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes.) She was the one who found the young corrido composer and made the inspired decision to put him at the center of the film, and she spent a year editing the many hours of footage into a tight, beautifully filmed, and fascinating portrait of a world that is currently in the news more than ever before.

"Sinaloa had not yet erupted in the level of violence that is now daily news on both sides of the border, but it was already a pretty dangerous place, and Natalia surprised everyone with her fearless willingness to take her crew up into areas like the small mountain town where Chalino Sanchez's brothers live. (Chalino is kind of the Tupac Shakur of the modern corrido scene, a brilliant lyricist who was shot down at the height of his fame.) The film has plenty of music, but is not principally a music documentary: Natalia wanted to give a picture of how Sinaloans were dealing with what Mexicans call "the crisis," and you don't have to love accordions to appreciate the result."

Tickets: $10.

100 Northern Ave., 617-478-3103 www.icaboston.org