Salvadoran-Mexican director Tatiana Huezo is a documentary film-maker who received great acclaim for her non-fiction work before pivoting triumphantly to drama in 2021 with Prayers for the Stolen – a heart-wrenching film, with something docu-realist in its gentleness and urgency, about children caught up in Mexican cartel violence. Now Huezo has returned to documentary with a film set in the remote village of El Eco in the central Mexican highlands. While Prayers for the Stolen was fiction with the texture of documentary, this – fascinatingly – is documentary with the look of fiction.
After a shooting period of a year and a half, Huezo and co-editor Lucrecia Gutierrez have shaped a family story so that it looks like exactly like realist drama, perhaps even drama adapted from a novel. In fact, if I didn’t know that it was a documentary, I would assume that it was a drama, devised through improvisation.
Montserrat (or Montse) is a teenage girl with a kid sister and brother working on a farm effectively run by her mum. Her dad is away a lot doing labouring work, but displays sexist attitudes on the subject of women’s work when he is home. Part of this work is looking after their ageing grandmother, involving tender scenes as the old woman is affectionately bathed and fed like a baby. But Montse dreams of getting away to the big city; she is already furious with her mum for not letting her compete in a local horse race, and then just disappears.
The Echo contains a heightened and guided reality, which may have been “written” at the shooting stage with different camera setups, and perhaps even some restaging (the sisters musingly look at the distant shadows they make on a distant hillside, and then we see those same shadows from their point of view). A distinctive, perhaps unique kind of intuitive, immersive film-making.