The Echo: Tatiana Huezo’s mesmerising docufiction film presents a holistic view of a rural Mexican village

In Tatiana Huezo’s latest feature, The Echo, darkly rich natural imagery and crystalline sound combine to create a poetically forceful impression of the small Mexican village that gives the film its name. Between the landscapes we see and the sounds we hear – of galloping hooves, bleating animals and distant thunder – human narratives wriggle in, highlighting the role of women in a rural society that seems to exist somewhere outside time. Girls help in the fields and with livestock but also laugh, cry and play. While Huezo shows us a profoundly holistic view of what it means to be alive and of the struggle to subsist on the land, perhaps what she most powerfully conveys is the difference between natural phenomena – birth and death, sowing and reaping – and limitations that are patriarchally constructed and imposed on the women, young and old. 

Huezo’s film erodes the distinction between human-centred narratives and their environment. A sky full of clouds and approaching rain is no less critical than a conversation between mother and daughter or grandmother and granddaughter. In this way, The Echo recalls Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978), with its patient attention to the details of rural traditions and crafts, or the work of Michelangelo Frammartino, in which human time gives way to the larger rhythms of the natural world. Huezo’s film, however, moves at a relatively rapid clip, given its expansive vision. Its rhythm isn’t patently lingering, as we’ve come to expect from meditative contemporary works such as Lois Patiño’s 2023 experimental feature Samsara, which shares The Echo’s privileging of image and sound but uses a significantly more durational approach to achieve its own metaphysical ends.

Huezo’s film more closely resembles pages being turned in a book. As they turn, so to speak, we see a young girl teaching her dolls in a makeshift schoolhouse, while another young girl bathes her aged grandmother, whose body has been twisted by the years. A married couple argue over who can work outside the home and a young girl hopes to ride a horse in a local competition. A variety of stories combine with naturalist observations to create a larger picture. As in Ivan Turgenev’s short story collection Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (1852), encounters with rural life provide both a type of documentary record and material for artistic creation. In one explicit instance, an older woman tells a group of children in hushed tones about a witch. The scene evokes the chapter in Turgenev’s book in which a group of young peasant boys share their superstitious fears about beasts and goblins around a campfire as the author’s surrogate pretends to sleep nearby. All this is to say that Huezo’s film is both narratively disparate and thematically consistent, favouring a collage-like approach which radically denies typical filmic structure in favour of an identity uniquely its own. 

Huezo has worked in both documentary and fiction filmmaking. Her 2011 documentary The Tiniest Place won a number of awards, and her 2021 fiction film Prayers for the Stolen, which was recognised at Cannes, laid the groundwork for The Echo’s focus on childhood. Here, the Mexican-Salvadorian director explores a docufiction approach, using her skills as a highly perceptive documentary artist to form a narrative that ties her subjects to not just the land they inhabit and tend but also to each other. It’s a web of moments and feelings that nestle themselves in our minds like firsthand memories.

In The Echo, the balance between detached observation and incisive commentary is highly effective – its larger vista reinforces rather than blunts the power of its message. When we see a lamb being born (a mother and her daughter assisting in the birth) or a sheep being slaughtered, the bonds of sexism and misogyny that haunt the film appear even more absurd and arbitrary. When a family has finished their meal, a young boy picks up his own plate – his father tells him to stop and to let his sister take care of it: “ This is what women are for,” he says. It’s a devastating moment, breaking the spell of pastoral beauty the film has conjured. From here, it’s impossible not to see the details Huezo includes to strengthen this often-tragic perspective. 

 ► The Echo is in UK cinemas from 26 July.