Mexican filmmaker Tania Hernández Velasco was presented with the Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award at the 23rd edition of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival for her feature film Titixe in its U.S. premiere. Hernández Velasco’s debut feature had its world premiere at the Rome Film Festival last fall and has played at the FICUNAM and Malaga film festivals.
After the filmmaker’s grandfather died, she convinced her city-dwelling family to return to their ancestral land and harvest their farm one last time before it’s sold. The film documents their uncovering of the leftovers (locally known as the “titixe”) of this man and his world: a mourning tree, dancing sprouts, the language of clouds, ghosts, stories and the endless menace of losing the crops to a tempest. Titixe is an intimate mosaic of the last harvest of a Mexican family, in a country that has forsaken its rural origins.
Hernández Velasco holds a BA in Film from Centro de Diseño, Cine y TV in Mexico City, as well as a Postgraduate Diploma in Film Editing and a Masters in Creative Documentary from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. She has been sponsored as a director under the Borderline program (Fest Associaçao Cultural, Espinho, Portugal, 2012) and in the Interaction Documentary Camp (Pozega, Serbia, 2013). Her short films have premiered in ZagrebDox and in the San Sebastian International Film Festival. She lives in Mexico City, where she develops her documentary projects and works as a film programmer for Los Cabos International Film Festival.
The 22nd annual edition of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival took place April 4-7 in Durham, North Carolina.
