Director Tatiana Huezo
The 52nd edition of Visions du Réel, the internationally renowned documentary film festival held each year in Nyon, Switzerland, has announced its 2021 program with a large selection of titles representing the Latin American region. Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, and Brazil are just some of the countries featured in this year’s edition of the prestigious festival, set to take place from April 15 to 25 in a predominantly virtual format.
Additionally, this year’s ‘Atelier’ section will honor the Mexican-Salvadoran director Tatiana Huezo with a major retrospective of her work, as well as two important Mexican films selected by the director: Poetas campesinos by Nicolás Echevarría and Trópico de cancer by Eugenio Polgovsky. This special program will also be accompanied by a public Masterclass led by Huezo herself. It’s worth remembering that last year’s ‘Atelier’ section honored a fellow female, Latin-American documentary filmmaker, Brazilian director Petra Costa.
The retrospective begins with Huezo’s first short, Árido, from 1992. An arid landscape in which various people move around: a girl walks along holding a goldfish in a glass of water, children have fun with an empty bathtub, people at their window observe what’s happening. And finally, rain. Drought is treated with realism and oneirism in the filmmaker’s first work, made when she was still a film student.
In Familia (2004), a farmer marries a neighbor’s daughter. When she falls ill, the man welcomes the woman’s sister into his home, forming an unusual family. They can’t have children. They adopt one, who is now married and has his own children. They all live together. A humanist film against exclusion, in favor of sharing.
Sueño (2005) starts with a woman’s body on a bed. The camera follows her silhouette and slides out of the window to frame an urban landscape on the water’s edge. The sky and the sea share the horizon. A breath of freedom emerges from the images, like a dream in the shade of summer. A short effort made as part of the Pompeu Fabra film school, in Barcelona.
The Tiniest Place by Tatiana Huezo
In The Tiniest Place / El lugar más pequeño (2011)—Huezo’s first feature-length documentary—Cinquera, a small village destroyed and abandoned during the Salvadoran Civil War, comes back to life with its old and new inhabitants. Memories of the violent and cruel past reverberate strongly in the words of the survivors. All around, the forest remains a protective and vital witness to existence. A powerful mosaic made up of images and words.
Absences / Ausencias, from 2015, follows a woman and two children, a boy and a girl. Further on, a man, her husband. The images of a happy family are broken by violence. The man and the boy disappear, without a trace. Misfortune becomes part of life. Words recount the past and keep hope alive for the future.
Also from 2015, Ver, oír y callar, Huezo’s contribution to the anthology film El aula vacía: dreams, voices that recount the violence in Mexico, fights between gangs, mourning for the dead. And a feeling of fear that resonates in the words. On-screen are girls, shown in the course of their daily lives, people who work, the details of their existence. A film that points at the deep disease of society.
In the dark of night, a woman shares her experience in Tempestad (2016). She has just come out of prison where she was subjected to all sorts of cruelty by the criminals who control it. The voice of another woman who has lost her daughter, abducted by a gang, accompanies her. On-screen, today’s Mexico, plunged into social unrest, between towns and the countryside.
Poetas Campesinos (1980) is Nicolas Echevaría’s seminal film. A film directed in San Felipe Otlaltepec, Mexico, about the artistic tradition of farmers that are part of the indigenous group of Papolocas. Huezo states of the film: “Its narrative form and staging captivated me. At that time, the norm was to use a narrator giving ethnographic explanations on this matter, but Nicolás Echevarría tantalizingly transitioned in that territory that exists between fiction and documentary to tell this story.”
Lastly, Tropic of Cancer / Trópico de cancer (2004) by Eugenio Polgovsky describes the practices enabling a Mexican family to survive between an age-old desert and modern-day highway. “This is my go-to film as a reminder of what honest, sharp and uncompromising cinema can provoke'', says Tatiana Huezo about Polgovsky’s film.
Users by Natalia Almada
Read on for the full roundup of this year’s Latin American titles at the Visi:
In the ‘International Feature Film Competition’ comes Users by acclaimed Mexican-American filmmaker Natalia Almada. Almada captures the ruthless locomotion of technology and offers a striking visual essay to explore the unintended and often dehumanizing consequences of our society's embedded belief that technological progress will lead to the betterment of humanity. Users is a critical and reflective meditation on these questions, using cinematic language that evokes the body and nature to counter the myth of technological progress.
Also in this section is The Moon Represents My Heart / La luna representa mi corazón by Argentine filmmaker of Taiwanese origin, Juan Martín Hsu. In his documentary, Hsu returns to Taipei to meet his mother after ten years without seeing her. Originally trying to make a movie about his father's death, Hsu eventually discovers that his mother, a strong and courageous woman, is the true protagonist of the story.
Two South American films are represented in the ‘Burning Lights Competition,’ an international section dedicated to new vocabularies and expressions, research, and to narrative and formal experimentation. Splinter / Esquirlas by Argentinian director Natalia Garayalde presents archival footage of the Río Tercero munitions factory’s explosion in 1995, shot by Garayalde when she was 12 years old. Equipped with her father’s camcorder, along with her younger brother, she documented the scale of the disaster in their hometown. Twenty years later, she digs out these archives and uses new ones to retrace this attack by the Argentine State.
Edna is Brazilian filmmaker Eryk Rocha’s latest film. Living next to the Transbrasiliana motorway in the Brazilian Amazonia, Edna is witness to a land in ruins built upon the massacres perpetrated by the military dictatorship. Using her personal journal, the documentary draws a magnificent portrait of this survivor who, with unheard of strength and courage, has persevered in resisting this “endless” war.
The ‘International Medium Length & Short Film Competition’ presents Colombian-Argentine filmmaker Cristina Motta’s short Surfaces / Superficies, in which, with an incisive tone, Motta calls for the memory of the people who fell victim to the political violence in Argentina and Colombia, two national territories that she holds close to her heart.
This section also features Becoming / Temporada the campo by the Mexican filmmaker Isabel Vaca. Becoming follows Bryan, a young and determined boy apprenticing over the summer in his family’s bull breeding business, and his efforts to be older than he is.
Borom Taxi by Andrés Guerberoff
From Argentina comes Andrés Guerberoff’s feature debut Borom Taxi, in which the filmmaker faces one of cinema’s long-lasting questions: “how does one film the Other?” In Borom Taxi, the answer is sensitive and sharp: the film brings us close to a state of uncertainty and disorientation, probably similar to that experienced by the characters, who have moved from Senegal to Buenos Aires.
Closing the Latin American participation in this section is Abyssal / Abisal by Cuban filmmaker Alejandro Alonso. The film follows Raudel, who lives and works in a ship-breaking yard in the West of Cuba. Haunted by a strange childhood memory, he is on the lookout for ghostly presences. Alonso recounts with poetry this territory emerging from limbo in which physical work, failed dreams, and traces of another time all rub shoulders.
Mexican-American director Carlos Alfonso Corral’s debut feature Dirty Feathers is part of the ‘Latitudes’ program, a non-competitive section dedicated to highlighting the panorama of current practices in non-fiction filmmaking. Dirty Feathers takes us to El Paso, Texas, where a homeless community living on the U.S.-Mexico border survives despite being abandoned by the political system. In intimate, black-and-white images, the film captures their everyday lives on the streets, as well as their hopes and their faith.
Cuban Dancer by Roberto Salinas and The Last Forest / A Última floresta by Luiz Bolognesi both feature in the ‘Grand Angle’ section. An Italian-Canadian-Chilian co-production, Roberto Salinas’s film follows 15 years-old Alexis, one of the promising dancers at the Cuban National Ballet School. When his parents decide to move to Florida, the young prodigy, determined to continue his training, comes up against the harshness of American teaching methods and his feelings of uprootedness.
In The Last Forest / A Última floresta, Brazilian screenwriter and director Luiz Bolognesi takes us to his home country, where the homeland of the Yanomami population is under threat from gold prospectors. Davi Kopenawa, a shaman and leader of the community, as well as the film’s co-writer, fights to preserve the land for the Yanomami’s future generations. Set in a luxuriant jungle where myth and reality blend together, The Last Forest is a real lesson on the meaning of resistance.
The 52nd edition of the Visions du Réel has been redesigned as a digital version to provide the public and professionals with a privileged access to the audacious and singular works selected this year. The Festival starts Thursday, April 15 and runs through Sunday, April 25, with tickets going on sale beginning April 14. View the entire lineup and program of special events at www.visionsdureel.ch.
