The documentary “The Echo”, by Mexican-Salvadoran director Tatiana Huezo has hit a number of screens across the UK this summer, with showings continuing until early September. The film follows three young girls from different families who live through the harsh realities of growing up in a village in rural Mexico.
Zac Liew
This movie marks a return to the documentary form for Tatiana Huezo, whose first feature film “Noche de fuego” (Prayers for the stolen) was shortlisted for Best International Feature at the 2022 Oscars. It is more uplifting in tone than her first two documentaries, “El lugar más pequeño” (2011) and “Tempestad (2016), which were centred around tragic events. “The Echo” (El Eco, 2023) lays bare the hardships that come with rural life in the Mexican highlands but offers hope for the three young girls there. While an ‘echo’ of traditions and culture reverberates through the village, Sarahí, Montse and Luz Ma learn to be resilient as they look after animals and the elderly in the face of tough and ever-changing weather conditions.
In an interview with the Argentine Film Festival (AFF), Huezo explains why she wanted to impart a more positive tone on this documentary.
After “Tempestad” she says she felt “so devastated, it was so hard to make, to come out of, to digest”. In her words it was “a film that left me sick, with a great darkness inside. So I said, my soul needs to rest a little. My next film must have more light.”
It took the director four years of spending time in and away from “The Eco” – the Mexican village that gives the film its name – to gain people’s trust and to film enough material.
“To gain their trust, so that they got to know me, I was accompanying people in their everyday tasks. Many times I slept in their houses. The base of this film is the complicity and the bond, the trust that we managed to build with the families and with the community,” she told AFF. Using the documentary form as a narrative for a film came with its own challenges. In the four-year period Huezo spent living in the village, someone passed away. This had a knock-on effect for the story development of one of the protagonists and from there Huezo had to take the project in a new direction.
Although Huezo was victim to vicissitudes, she made good use of something she could rely on- the changing of the seasons: “My intuition told me we had to feel the passing of time, as well as the fact that every activity changed depending on the season. The season also changed the landscape, the splendour of autumn, its colours, the abundance. Then the drought comes and the animals die. I sensed that the passing of time was going to help me to narrate how the children were growing up.”
At one point in the film one of the young girls is forbidden by her mother to take part in a race. In another scene, a father tells his son at the dinner table: “Leave your plate. Men don’t wash dishes. That’s what women are for.”
The expression on the face of the boy’s young sister, Luz Ma, one of the protagonists, is indignant, yet she stays quiet. It is a deafening silence for Huezo, who said she wanted to build female characters that ‘question’ their role in a patriarchal system. “I love seeing real women on screen with all their lights and shadows and I like making films in which you journey through a deep and profound emotional and sensory journey and where you encounter real character with whom you can walk and laugh and cry and feel,” she says.
This is the fifth feature film by Tatiana Huezo and it has already won several awards and nominations. It premiered at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival in February, 2023, where Huezo won a Best Director award.
More information: Argentine Film Festival London and Facebook (Tatiana Huezo)
(Photos: AFFL Press)
.jpg)
