The Echo by Tatiana Huezo
First Look, the Museum of the Moving Image’s annual film festival, returns for its 13th edition. Known for showcasing adventurous new cinema and offering fresh perspectives on the art and process of filmmaking, this year’s diverse slate of major New York premieres features four Latin American films from Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia, co-presented with Cinema Tropical.
Sujo, directed by Mexican filmmakers Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez (Identifying Features), will have its New York premiere on the festival's opening night. The film follows the story of four-year-old Sujo who, after the murder of his father by fellow cartel henchmen, is snuck out of town by women who then raise him as their own. As Sujo grows into a young man, he and his friends follow temptation and the lure of easy money back into town, where further tragedy awaits.
Unlike most stories set in the milieu of Mexican cartels, Sujo’s arc doesn’t end there. He moves to Mexico City to earn an honest, threadbare living and begins to audit classes thanks to a sympathetic teacher. But violence still shadows him, and there may be a limit to what he can escape. Rondero and Valadez’ feature won the Grand Jury Prize in the World Dramatic Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
The Echo / El eco, directed by Mexican-Salvadoran auteur Tatiana Huezo, will also have its New York premiere, as part of the ongoing series ‘Las Premieres.’ Huezo’s epic and intimate film deftly combines her aptitude for both fiction (Prayers for the Stolen) and nonfiction (Tempestad) in one uncategorizable, absorbing cinematic experience. Such hybridity suits the film’s characters: young women in the remote Mexican town of El Eco who exude vivacious optimism while shouldering disproportionately gendered responsibilities of family, farm life, and town.
Huezo familiarized herself with the community over a four-year period before embarking on a year-and-a-half shoot that overflows with seasonal spectacle, emotional peaks and valleys, and vigorous, tactile existence. The Echo was awarded Best Documentary Award at the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival and 2023 Morelia International Film Festival.
Brazilian filmmaker João Pedro Bim’s astonishing and ingenious documentary Behind Closed Doors / A Portas Fechadas dives into the 1968 enactment of Institutional Act No. 5, the most violent military dictatorship period in Brazil, which suspended the constitution, silenced citizens, and opted overtly into totalitarianism. The act was decided upon during a meeting of the National Security Council, which was recorded but went unheard until Bim’s documentary.
Combining archival audio documents with blithe moving image propaganda perpetuated by the government throughout their regime, Bim explicitly identifies each speaker as well as the provenance of the images the audience is consuming, effectively putting the viewer in the position of archivist, historian, and outraged citizen of the world. The brevity and matter-of-factness with which the Brazilian leaders dismantle democracy is both shocking and ominously reminiscent of the state of things more than half a century later.
The experimental project Print Analysis (2 B), co-directed by Anja Dornieden and Colombian filmmaker Juan David González Monroy, will have its world premiere at First Look. The 16mm film intends to understand the choices behind the creation of a single cinematographic image—the attempt to produce a perfect image and the inability to attain the envisioned result.
The 2024 edition of First Look will take place March 13-17 in New York City.
