The work of Salvadoran-Mexican filmmaker Tatiana Huezo is often marked by sorrow. The pain of loved ones who did not disappear but were instead disappeared; male hands ravaging female bodies with great violence; land once joyful turned captivity; blood staining clothes and dirt and skin alike, tinting reality with the sombre crimson of death. Alas, Huezo’s return to documentary after a harrowing narrative debut in 2021’s Prayers for the Stolen proves her tenderest work yet, a soulful chronicling of the rhythms of the titular The Echo.
A remote village located within the Mexican state of Puebla, El Eco is somewhat frozen in time. People wash in large tin tubs with the help of rusty buckets, food is planted and harvested before cooked and animals are at once transport, helper and friend. Unlike her previous documentaries, Huezo captures the routine of the place solely through observation, foregoing interviews and voice-over accounts in favour of lingering images that allow for a full immersion into this bucolic world without the tempting crutches of overexposition.
Capturing small acts of intimacy without tainting their sacredness requires a particular kind of observational skill set, one that Huezo not only possesses but masters. She rests her camera by the darkness of a small living room as the kitchen light reveals a father and mother as man and woman, speaking candidly about the gendered labour of parenthood as their child sits quietly next door. As daylight erupts, the camera lands on a girl as she comes to terms with the biological shift ushering her into womanhood, her sister whispering precious words of advice — she must “take care of herself” now. What does that mean, the young girl asks, and the stern silence is an answer in itself.
Such moments are crucial to Huezo’s capturing of womanhood in this slice of rural Mexico, a place where centuries-old notions of gender live side by side with a rebellious feminine spirit that seeks a more equal future. The same girls who play a physical game of football with boys on the field return home to be told stories of witches and curses placed upon misbehaved women; a teenage girl is expected to tend to the family horses but forbidden from riding them, an honour bestowed only upon young and strong men.
Huezo is a filmmaker curious about the lives of women and children, placing them at the centre of all her work, and the same is true of The Echo, a film that sees the reality of this rural world through the eyes of mothers, daughters and wives, no longer satellites in the lives of men but planets of their own.
The children of El Eco go from giggling amongst the trees to brandishing large, rusty fish knives, multiuse tools used to plough the fields, kill livestock in improvised abattoirs and chop wood to heat uninsulated houses as winter draws near. The local kids also help Huezo establish this dichotomy between the lulling tides of the local routine and the lingering preoccupation that this way of living might not exist by the time the children who run free amidst the natural labyrinths of El Eco begin having children of their own.
This is less because the young want to leave the village — although some, of course, do — and more due to this extradiegetic conversation between the art and the viewer, who is always aware of the violence with which the gruelling beats of modern life can infiltrate the few corners of the world still unbound by its hungry demands. In The Echo, such demands come knocking every once in a while, taking away a father and leaving in his place a phone filled with unread messages turned pleas or separating a mother and daughter, whose views of the world outside the village belong to different generations.
These clashes mirror the one in the documentary. The echo which lends its name to both film and village permeates Huezo’s documentary as a constant cacophony — sheep bleat, horses neigh, chickens cluck. Pans clink, knives pluck, women shush. The result is a seesawing between audio and image: sound is always busier when the images are quieter, sound is always quieter as images become more populated. This understanding of when to listen and when to interject reflects Huezo’s intimate knowledge of the people and place at hand, an understanding obtained after four years embedded in El Eco and over a year of shooting.
The director’s patience proves right the rhythms of the land: you reap what you sow. And as life unravels in El Eco, Huezo sees no great need to offer answers. Will the ones who left return? Will the ones who stayed find a way to move on? There is no way of truly knowing, as once Huezo leaves the pueblo, El Eco feels almost like a dream, suspended in time and beautifully preserved through the eyes of a filmmaker who sees it fully and loves it dearly.
Rafa Sales Ross is a Brazilian film journalist, critic and programmer currently living in Scotland. She contributes to Variety, BBC Culture, Sight & Sound among others, and can often be seen writing about Latin American Cinema and explorations of death and desire.