Expectations were high for El Eco (The Echo), as one of the greatest films to come out of the Berlin Film Festival in the last decade remains Tatiana Huezo’s 2016 film, Tempestad.
The Salvadoran-Mexican director masterfully alternated two narratives in a textured film that examined the consequences of organised crime in Mexico and what mothers will sacrifice in order to protect the ones they love. It’s a poetic and unconventionally immersive film, words that also apply to her third full-length film.
This observational documentary takes its name from the remote mountain community in Puebla state, Mexico. Life in El Eco consists of elementary things; the children tend to the sheep, plant crops, take care of their elders... And in dealing with the challenges of the passing seasons, they quickly learn about death and illness.
Our entry point into this life is Montserrat (or Montse), a teenage girl who has, like the other children, grown up too fast. She dreams of getting away and struggles with her mum’s refusal for her to compete in a local horse race.
Then, suddenly, she disappears...
Much like Huezo’s 2021 fiction debut, Prayers for the Stolen, the director knows how to tell the story of young women growing up in difficult circumstances and excels in exploring female bonds – matrilineal or other.
With The Echo, however, Huezo constructs a more oneiric, slow burning portrait of the tender and often harsh realities of an isolated community through three generations of women. We observe the care-working matriarchy and the responsibilities passed down from generation to generation, regardless of whether these life burdens are offered up prematurely. All without time markers, which only adds to the dreamlike mood that Huezo instills throughout.
It’s an evocative mosaic that celebrates communal joys and finds fascinating intimacy in the things left unsaid, as well as eloquence in the slightest of details. Props go to Huezo’s director of photography Ernesto Pardo, whose expansive shots of the harsh but beautiful geography are counterbalanced by the seemingly inessential minutiae that reveal themselves to be anything but trivial.
Both vast and restrained, poetic yet severe, it’s tough to find the words to do justice to The Echo. Its rhythms lull the viewer into an immersive dirge unlike any other, one with an unmistakable undercurrent of tragedy. Because as beautiful as this film is, Huezo empathetically reminds us that remote communities like El Eco seem fated to fracture.
El Eco (The Echo) premiered at the 2023 Berlinale and continues its theatrical rollout this year.
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