as part of our latest Cinetopia:DOC screening event at the Cameo Cinema in Edinburgh on 11th September 2024, Cinetopia:DOC co-curator, Amaya Bañuelos Marco, sat down with filmmaker Tatiana Huezo for an in-depth pre-recorded interview about her recent documentary, El Eco (2023), winner of the 2023 Berlinale Documentary Award. The interview was conducted in Spanish and translated into English below. Below is an excerpt from their conversation. The original video interview is also available (embedded below).

Amaya: Thank you so much for talking to us about your film, The Echo. I wanted to start by asking you about your previous film Prayers for the Stolen, where you already portrayed the lives of young girls or adolescents in a rural context. So, I wanted to know why it was important for you to return to this specific setting and tell this story from the perspective of childhood.

Tatiana Huezo: I don't know, I have a fascination with the rural world. When I was a child, I grew up in the countryside, among cows and sheep, my early childhood years were in that world, and perhaps that has something to do with it. In reality, The Echo was born from a need to continue talking about childhood, to speak about what it means to grow up. The desire arises from wanting to capture a bit of that vital impulse that exists at that moment of our existence, which is so fleeting and so full of, how can I put it… yes, of magic, of tenderness.

It's a moment in life where we question things with great purity, where we believe, where play is a territory of freedom and a refuge from the adult world. But it's also a time where marks are left that perhaps will accompany us for the rest of our lives. That voice of the parents, the learning, and also, in some way, the voice of the environment that surrounds us. And in this case, the environment is nature and the animals that inhabit this rural world, which significantly shape the existence of all the characters.

And well, I wanted to work in the rural world because peasant children grow up earlier. They become adults very quickly. They acquire responsibilities very soon, and this was going to be an added layer, something much more powerful for the film than if I had gone to film children in the city. So, that's why I returned to this village. It took me six months to find it. My strategy was how do I find the children and those eyes of discovery that I want for my film. How do I find them? And I said, well, schools. And then I thought, well, not just any school…rural schools. So, I approached Conafe, which is a very important organization of rural teachers in Mexico, And after several months, I arrived at El Eco.

Q: I was very interested in how your film, despite almost this idyllic world, still shows those strict gender roles that the girls start to assume from an early age. So, I wondered if you were interested in showing that tension from the beginning of this rural world, which is idyllic in some way, but also, the beginning of assuming those strict gender roles.

Tatiana Huezo: Yes, I wanted to make a film in the peasant world, and for me, it was very important not to romanticise, not to romanticise this universe that is besieged by many difficulties in one way or another and by different forms of violence. One of them is economic violence. These are all families, and in the peasant world in Mexico, they have a subsistence economy, which is very harsh; survival to get food, for the children to have access to education, etc. It's also a world that, in some way, is besieged by the plundering of their natural resources. I believe that the peasants are the last guardians of the land and the territory, and they are constantly exposed and plundered by extractive projects that go in and take away their natural resources. Migration is another problem that arises from the economic problems of the families; they have to migrate, etc. So, within all this wise world of learning from the land, the bond with the land, the loving care of the children, it was necessary to tell this ghost of difficulty and violence because the violence is there, but it only hovers over the story. I wanted to focus on something else, which was the care of raising children, the care of the land and animals, learning, discovery. And within all this, I found that boys and girls are being prepared to take on their role as men or women in the community and, well, in the world, And it's a very, very conservative, very strict role. It’s a community, but I think most communities in Mexico are like this. By community, I mean a small village. Rural or indigenous. And girls get married very young, women have children very early, and in some way, this conditions their role, yes, their human role, let's say, right? In the community.

It was very important for me to find girls, mothers, female characters who do not have a completely static position within this patriarchal system, let's say, that exists, These are characters who question these roles, characters, yes, who question, who do not conform, who move from their place, who do things in secret, like this little girl who rides this horse because she wants to run a horse race, and there are no women jockeys in the entire region. So, I have a special fascination with this rebellion, with this search for their own place in the world. I have a fascination with this. And for me, it was also important not to question this education that has been passed down through generations. Not to criticise or judge, let's say, the male role. Because I think it’s much more complex than it may seem at first glance. And that father who tells the boy not to clear his plate because only women do that, well, he was educated that way. But he is a present father, a loving father, a father who also teaches his daughter how to hold a machete, to harvest the corn, and plants the seed in her that says work is not easy, right? But work must be done with love. So, I feel it's a film with many layers, and those are the films I like to make, where there are different readings, and everyone draws their own conclusions.

Q: The work of care in your film is shown with great value. It’s so important in this society, in this microcosm of The Echo. And I wanted to ask if you think this film might help people in Mexico, but also everywhere, because it’s a global problem, to see the importance of care work in our societies.

Tatiana Huezo: Yes, the truth is, I didn’t think this theme would become so important and significant for me. It wasn’t a topic that I had in mind, but the narrative line that developed when I saw this granddaughter caring for her grandmother became enormous. And then, when the moment of the grandmother's death came, which was something we didn’t expect, I think it’s one of the greatest things that making this film left with me, something that will stay with me forever, which is how powerful, how important the sense of community is in the lives of villages and people.

And it’s a sense of community that we have already lost in the big cities, and it has to do with caring for others. When the grandmother died, that night people from all the surrounding villages started arriving with bags, with bread, with coffee, with tamales. Many, many people started gathering, in the middle of Covid, without caring at all because they have bigger problems than Covid. Dozens of people arrived with their prayers, with their songs, to embrace the family, to support them, to accompany them in this moment. To honour the death of this old woman and to say goodbye to her with deep affection. And they stayed for several days, taking care of cooking, of supporting the family in such a painful moment.

And when I realized this, it became very important to say this is a film that honours death. And that’s something huge. In the embrace, in connection with others, in caring for others. And I was very moved to realise, after having shot all this, that this is also a film that honours death and honours this very human thing that is ours and belongs to us. But which has been forgotten, which is that, which is caring for others. The care, tending with affection, being attentive to others, especially in moments of life where this is very important. Like old age. So, yes, I think it’s something very human that we also are, and that the film awakens this too.

Q: Now, I wanted to ask you a bit about the style of the film, the documentary style, because, well, your visual and sound style immerses us fully in this community, and sometimes I’ve seen your film described as docu-fiction. And at Cinetopia: DOC, we are very interested in showing more creative documentaries that go beyond the formulas most viewers associate with documentaries, and we believe your film is a magnificent example of this. Could you tell us a bit about the production and how you managed to portray these lives with such delicacy and affection, for example, by not using interviews or filming your subjects so closely?

Tatiana Huezo: Yes, I don’t consider it a docu-fiction because fiction implies bringing to the table, so to speak, situations, texts, dialogues, that don’t belong to the universe. That don’t belong to the characters, that have been written in some way by someone outside of that universe. I think it’s the film with the most beautiful dialogues I will ever have in my career because not a single word of mine is put into the mouth of any of the characters. These are their problems, their relationships, their own dialogues, their conversations, their discussions, their needs.

And the key behind this film is four years of being with them, being very close to them. I became part of the families; we became part of the community. The parents fully trusted us to let us be with the children. But also to be close to very intimate everyday and family moments. And well, coming from the last film, which was a fiction, I really wanted to implement a different approach to making this film and also to make it more attractive to the viewer. And to strip away a bit of the idea from documentary filmmaking of creation, this idea—since the word documentary has already a tremendous stigma—of this idea of informative, boring, painful, important, urgent…

All of that is important and good, and there are wonderful documentaries in that sense, but for me, documentary cinema is cinema, and it has the same emotional and aesthetic value as any fiction film.

With this film it was also an opportunity to say I’m not going to work with voice-over, I’m not going to work with interviews, we’re going to have a more daring camera setup, to move very quickly and have a camera setup closer to fiction. So, for example, one of the discussions with the photographer, Ernesto, was who do we film first when it comes to a conversation? where can something unrepeatable and unique arise? because we need to capture that. Then you can build the rest with the character, by listening, and so on. So, these were very interesting discussions. And about what is the unrepeatable moment to see where the camera goes first. And then the film is edited, it’s cut like a fiction. You build a storm that on screen lasts 3 minutes, but I recorded 20 storms over many days, and then in the film, there’s a great storm. And well, if you go to The Echo and experience a storm, it’s like the one in the film. But well, it’s impossible to shoot a storm in a—you’d need 15 cameras and be in 15 different places in the village.

So, there’s that, and on the other hand, for me, films are visual, sound, immersive journeys. I’m fascinated when I can live inside another planet, another universe. And so there’s very important work concerning the image, great care. It was also a challenge to portray the place where we shot for 18 months over different periods. So it was a challenge to tell this space as a living entity that transforms with the arrival of winter, the fog, the wind. Being very close to the animals, capturing all their bodily, guttural gestures, coughs, sneezes, hearing the breath of the shepherd dog, etc. Trying to humanise the animals a bit too and connect us as viewers to them, to have a little piece of the sensory dimension or so, of how they live. They are connected in a very strong way to the animals, the characters, and so there’s very important work on sound design, mixing, colour correction. Yes, aesthetically, it’s a very powerful film, I think, and it’s one of the things that gives me the most satisfaction that we achieved with The Echo.

DOC Discussions: Tatiana Huezo, Director, THE ECHO (EL ECO)

INTERVIEW: Elzbieta Vozbinaitė, Director of ShortScape Festival