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.
