1945. Potsdam, Germany. Before negotiating the postwar fate of the world, Truman, Churchill and Stalin paused to listen to an American rifleman named Stuart Canin play his violin. The Rifleman's Violin is a short documentary that revisits this extraordinary intersection of history and music. The Rifleman's Violin is the centerpiece of an ongoing multimedia collaboration between Citizen Film and the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University to create a physical and online multimedia archive entitled Potsdam Revisited: Overture to the Cold War, preserving Canin's extraordinary story and the rare artifacts and memories he collected during his tour of duty.
The film is followed by a discussion with the filmmakers and a live performanceby Mr. Canin, still a virtuoso violinist at 89 years old. He will reprise the private concert he gave the Big Three 70 years ago.