Tribute to Tatiana Huezo
Director Tatiana Huezo, one of the most important emerging voices in international cinema of the last decade, who was awarded the Best Documentary Feature Award for El eco (2023) at the last Berlin Film Festival, will be one of the special guests at the 64th edition of the Festival dei Popoli, the international documentary film festival, scheduled in Florence from November 4 to 12.
For 15 years, Tatiana Huezo has been passionately chronicling the deep soul of a beautiful and painful country, full of wounds and contradictions. The filmmaker-born in San Salvador and then moved to Mexico City-will be honoured with a retrospective of her work, the first in Italy, and will meet the public at a masterclass.
Active primarily in documentary filmmaking, she made her debut in 2008 with Retrato de Familia and returned to her home country to film El lugar más pequeno (2011) and then established herself with the masterpiece Tempestad (2016), a painful journey into the memories and places of disappeared women in the Mexican Yucatan. The subsequent Prayers for the Stolen (2021), awarded a special mention within the Un certain regard section of the Cannes Film Festival, is a sensitive and tormented coming-of-age novel in which some girls live out their youth amid joys and fears, in a social and community context marked by the violence of the many kidnappings at the hands of criminal cartels. His latest work, El eco (2023), was presented at the Berlin Film Festival 2023, receiving the Best Director award in the Encounters section and Best Documentary. The film, which also includes elements of fiction, portrays children from an isolated village "El Echo" in the Mexican highlands, where they care for their elders.
Explained Festival dei Popoli artistic director Alessandro Stellino, "This is a director whom we have been following since her debut and who, with very few films to her credit, has already achieved a leading status at the international level, as demonstrated by the important recognition bestowed on her at the last Berlinale. Her cinema is unique, politically conscious and with a strong cinematic, narrative and lyrical structure, she addresses some of the most dramatic issues of contemporary Mexican society by translating them into a vision that never leaves one indifferent. Through the gaze of women, sometimes little girls, she recounts with deep sensitivity a mythical and ancestral world and the most dangerous ridges beyond which we sometimes lean and lose our innocence. All her films are forms of resistance and struggle, stances in favour of the freedom of individuals and communities, and at the same time poetic prayers for all that has been taken from them and denied them."
