Cinélatino: the "golden drops" of director Tatiana Huezo, another look

Mexican-Salvadoran director Tatiana Huezo (pictured here in March 2022) is one of the guests at the 35th Rencontres Cinélatino de Toulouse (March 2023) Getty Images via AFP - JON KOPALOFF

Text by: Isabelle Le Gonidec

7 min

To calm the impatience of waiting for the latest documentary by director Tatiana Huezo, born in El Salvador but living in Mexico, El Eco, awarded in February 2023 in Berlin, the Cinélatino meetings in Toulouse offer a retrospective of her work. A retrospective that she accompanies, indulging in the game of questions and answers, evoking with passion her work, these stories of which she is the smuggler, her "drops of gold" as she calls them.

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from our special envoy in Toulouse,

Guest of the Otra Mirada section of the Rencontres de Toulouse, Tatiana Huezo is also a jury for the Festival's favorite Grand Prix, in other words that 2023 promises to be a prosperous and busy year for the director, already crowned for her work in several festivals. Since her first short films - the first Arido dates from 1992 - she has taken an original look at the two countries that inhabit her. El Salvador where she was born and lived until the age of four and where she filmed El lugar mas pequeño (2011), and Mexico where she lives, where she created her only fiction film, Noche de fuego which earned her international notoriety because it was awarded at Cannes where it was selected in "Un certain regard" in 2021, and the documentary Tempestad (2016).

► Read also: Noche de fuego by Tatiana Huezo, danger for girls in narco country

Noche de fuego is a Mexican-Salvadoran film by Tatiana Huenzo, presented in the Horizontes latinos section of this 69th edition of the San Sebastian International Film Festival. © SSIF

In her films, short and feature films, she explores the issues of violence, corruption, enforced disappearances, memory. In El Salvador, for El lugar mas pequeño (presented at Visions du Réel in 2011 and winner of best feature film) she returned to film in the village of her paternal grandmother, Cinquera. A village destroyed during the Salvadoran conflict (1980-1992), a martyred village razed by the army because suspected of being red, to support the FMLN guerrillas in which part of his family was engaged. "Only the bell tower was still standing" when we returned, said one woman. It took the survivors, back in the village, to clean everything, sweep away the bones and traces of the war, she continues. And the film opens with this story and women sweeping away dead leaves. It's early morning, the village wakes up, the inhabitants go about their daily tasks.

The voice-over, the off-screen narrative

This is the device adopted by Tatiana Huezo in her two feature-length documentaries: the testimonies are voice-over on the image. A cinematic and formal bias against the advice of her producer in the first feature documentary El lugar mas pequeño, she explains, and which she kept in Tempestad. The voices take us by the ear and the heart, with their silences, their emotions, the tears returned or not. Tatiana Huezo collects the stories during long hours of listening, with a single microphone. Little by little, the witness lets go of his emotions, listens to his own voice and his story has a therapeutic, liberating virtue, also for himself, says the director. He is led to confide, to release a pain sometimes contained for years, as was the case for Rosy, the young woman artist of Cinquera.

Rosy de Cinquera, in the documentary "El lugar mas pequeño" by Tatiana Huezo (2011): during the 1980s, El Salvador was plunged into a violent civil war whose traces still weigh on the inhabitants. © Cinélatino 2023

The sound (beyond the voice-overs of the stories, the soundtracks – sounds of nature, music – are very rich, with a special mention for Jacobo Lieberman's musical illustrations in both documentaries) and the image make sense independently of each other, and merge wonderfully to captivate all the senses of the viewer. The image also feeds the story, but besides, rarely in an illustrative way. At most, the remains of boots and clothes, covered with beautiful and fragile mushrooms in the forest of El lugar mas pequeño, testify that guerrillas lived there and were probably killed. It is an "inhabited" forest...

The narrative structure in the second documentary, Tempestad, responds to the same device. Two stories frame the film: that of Miriam, a woman sent to prison when she is innocent because heads had to fall to show that justice works... A prison run by the narcos of the Cartel del golfo; and at the same time the story of Adela, mother of a missing girl, whom the family has been searching for ten years.

In "Tempestad", a documentary by Tatiana Huezo, two stories intersect, including that of Adela, whose daughter, a student (pictured), was kidnapped ten years ago by human traffickers in cahoots with the authorities. © Cinélatino 2023

On these two stories, images of the circus where Adela works, the mother clown surrounded by a tribe of women and children acrobats, men and women at work in Matamoros, near the US border, where Miriam was detained, and especially a bus and its passengers that go on a long North-South road: the journey Miriam made to return home to Tulum, after his incarceration in Matamoros.

The storm over a battered country

These bus rides are the backbone of the film. There travel the potential victims of these villainous kidnappings for ransom that haunt Mexico. Passengers are subjected to repeated and intrusive checks by a police and an army that inspire fear and mistrust. If we see Adela in the middle of her fairground tribe, Miriam's face never appears on screen, so these anonymous Mexicans on the bus appear as so many Miriam possible. The passengers are filmed in semi-darkness, in a temporal in-between, that of the journey, their looks a little vague. The framing and images - signed Ernesto Pardo - are extraordinarily neat: landscapes of faces and moors beaten by a wind that blows in storm. Thunderstorms and waterspouts, like a parable of the violence suffered by a bruised country. Because in neither of these two documentaries is the violence explicit on screen. As in Noche de fuego where, for example, the color red had been banned, violence is off-screen, in the story of the inhabitants of Cinquera or in the stories of Adela and Miriam.

A formal freedom claimed

Tatiana Huezo claims these aesthetic and formal choices: "documentary cinema is cinema, with an assumed subjectivity: you receive a story, a narrative and as a filmmaker, you are the first to digest it, to chew it, you are the first filter... with your own story." The director's only commitment is, for her, ethical: to be very faithful in her story to the testimony of her characters and in the relationship she establishes with them. "But in the form of my story, I want to be as free as possible," she adds. "I try to make sure that my films don't literally tell the story of violence; to move away from this literality of the narrative to open a space for the viewer to think, feel, work his imagination, complete the story. The documentary is like a treasure hunt, we receive these stories as "drops of gold", says Tatiana Huezo."Drops of gold" and films that also participate in a work of denunciation and memory.

► The Cinélatino website

Cinélatino, 35th Rencontres de Toulouse © Cinélatino 2023

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