To calm the impatience of waiting for the latest documentary by director Tatiana Huezo, born in El Salvador, but living in Mexico, The Eco, awarded in February 2023 in Berlin, the Cinélatino meetings in Toulouse offer a retrospective of his 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 conduit, her “golden drops” as she calls them.
from our special correspondent in Toulouse,
Guest of the section Other mirada Toulouse Meetings, Tatiana Huezo is also the jury for the Festival’s Grand Prix Coup de Coeur, which means that the year 2023 promises to be a busy and prosperous year for the director, already crowned for her work in several festivals. She poses, since her first short films – the first Arido dates from 1992- an original look at the two countries that inhabit it. El Salvador where she was born and lived until the age of four and where she filmed El lugar mas pequeño (2011), and the Mexico where she lives, where she created her only fiction film, Noche de fuego which earned him international notoriety because he was awarded at Cannes where he was selected in “Un certain regard” in 2021, and the documentary Tempestad (2016).
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In her films, short and feature films, she delves into questions of violence, corruption, enforced disappearances, memory. In El Salvador, for El lugar mas pequeño (presented at Visions du Réel in 2011 and winner of the 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 martyr village razed by the army because it was suspected of being red, of supporting the FMLN guerrillas in which part of his family was engaged. ” Only the steeple was still standing when we came back, says a woman. It was necessary for the survivors, back in the village, to clean everything, to sweep away the bones and the traces of the war, she continues. And the film opens with this story and with women sweeping up dead leaves. It’s early morning, the village wakes up, the inhabitants go about their daily tasks.
The voice-over, the off-camera narrative
This is the device adopted by Tatiana Huezo in her two feature documentaries: the testimonies are in voice-over on the image. A cinematographic and formal bias against the advice of its producer in the first feature-length documentary El lugar mas pequeño, she explains, and that she kept in Tempestad. The voices take us by the ear and the heart, with their silences, their emotions, the tears shed or not. Tatiana Huezo collects stories for 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 that has been contained sometimes for years, as was the case for Rosy, the young woman artist from Cinquera.
The sound (beyond the voiceovers of the stories, the soundtracks -sounds of nature, music- are very rich, with a special mention for the musical illustrations of Jacobo Lieberman in the two documentaries) and the image make sense independently each other, and merge beautifully to captivate all the senses of the viewer. The image also feeds the story, but on the side, rarely in an illustrative way. At most the remains of boots and clothes, covered with pretty and fragile mushrooms in the forest ofEl lugar mas pequeño, testify that there lived and undoubtedly were killed guerrillas. It’s a forest inhabited »…
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 roll 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 young girl, whom the family has been looking for for ten years.
On these two stories, images of the circus where Adela works, the mother clown surrounded by a tribe of women and child acrobats, men and women at work in Matamoros, near the United States border, where Miriam was detained, and especially a bus and its passengers who spin on a long North-South route: the journey that Miriam made to return home to Tulum, after her incarceration in Matamoros.
The storm over a bruised country
These bus journeys are the backbone of the film. There travel the potential victims of these heinous kidnappings for ransom that haunt Mexico. Passengers are subjected to repeated and intrusive checks by a police and army that inspires fear and mistrust. If we see Adela in the middle of her tribe of carnies, Miriam’s face never appears on the screen, which means that these anonymous Mexicans on the bus appear as many possible Miriams. The passengers are filmed in semi-darkness, in a temporal in-between, that of travel, their gazes a little vague. The framing and the images -signed Ernesto Pardo- are extraordinarily neat: landscapes of faces and moors beaten by a stormy wind. Storms and downpours, like a parable of the violence suffered by a battered country. Because in neither of these two documentaries, the violence is explicit on the screen. As in Noche de fuego where, for example, the color red had been banished, violence is off-screen, in the story of the inhabitants of Cinquera or in the stories of Adela and Miriam.
A claimed formal freedom
These aesthetic and formal choices, Tatiana Huezo claims them: “ 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 only commitment of the director is, for her, of an ethical order: 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 intend to be as free as possible “, she adds. ” I try to ensure that my films do not literally tell the violence; to deviate from this literalness of the story to open up a space for the viewer to think, feel, make their imagination work, complete the story. » The documentary is like a treasure hunt, we receive these stories as “drops of gold”, tells Tatiana Huezo. golden drops » and films which also participate in a work of denunciation and memory.
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