Collateral damage
Tatiana Huezo’s films exude humanity and pathos
In her documentaries and recent fictional debut, she tells the story of women and children in conflict zones
Ana lives with her mother in a small mountain village in Mexico. Like other girls her age, she spends her days going to school and inventing games with her friends, but all is not well. Her mother and the other parents seem preoccupied, and tension hangs in the air. One day she and her friends are taken to the barber to get closely cropped, boyish haircuts. They don’t understand why—yet on some level they learn not to attract attention in a world where adults work in a nearby poppy field and menacing black SUVs roar by.
“Noche de Fuego” (“Prayers for the Stolen”, pictured below), Tatiana Huezo’s new film, is adapted from a novel by Jennifer Clement and offers a glimpse of Ana’s life at the ages of eight and 14. The spectre that haunts villagers’ dreams comes into fearsome focus when people start to disappear. Here, as in other areas, drug cartels are employing human trafficking as an instrument of terror. Ana is taught to hide in a hole in the ground at a moment’s notice.
It is the first fiction feature from Ms Huezo, whose documentaries about violence in Central America have won praise from critics and audiences alike. Her debut film, “El lugar más pequeño” (“The Tiniest Place”, 2011), explored the legacy of the brutal 12-year civil war in El Salvador by interviewing survivors in a decimated village. In “Tempestad” (2016), two women told of their nightmarish experiences at the hands of cartels and corrupt police. In “Noche de Fuego” Ms Huezo uses a different mode to explore a familiar theme: the vulnerability of women and children in dangerous places.
The film had its premiere in July at the Cannes Film Festival, where it earned a special mention from the jury and was later acquired by Netflix. Rather than repeating the storylines employed in so many narco-dramas, Ms Huezo keeps the camera close to Ana and her friends in order to focus on their perspective. The youngsters are curious, yet not fully comprehending: “I wanted to construct this huge invisible monster as a threat that surrounded the little girls’ lives,” Ms Huezo says, “but I didn’t want to show it graphically.”
The film-maker was born in San Salvador in 1972 to a Mexican mother and Salvadoran father. Leftist guerrilla organisations such as the Fuerzas Populares de Liberación Farabundo Martí and the People’s Revolutionary Army were being set up, and the possibility of insurrection was mounting. Her mother took the four-year-old Ms Huezo and her sister and returned to Mexico. (She and the children’s father had separated.) “We ended up in the back of a pickup truck,” Ms Huezo says of the border crossing. “I remember the wind blowing in my face. I had sand in my eyes.”
Once safely resettled, Ms Huezo’s mother, a painter, took her to see films—not the usual children’s fare but work by David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, François Truffaut and Wim Wenders. It stirred a passion for movie-making and Ms Huezo later studied at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica, an internationally lauded film school in Mexico City, and the Universidad Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, a home for ambitious documentary-makers.
She has garnered respect in the documentary field, and is often described by critics as one of the most skilled directors of her generation. In her first two documentaries Ms Huezo rejected the talking-heads approach, often conducting interviews without a camera. As a result, she used only the audio from those conversations, and the images and voiceovers do not match for long stretches; she avers that “you can get inside of people through their voices” as much as by watching their faces. Whereas many directors use sound technicians, Ms Huezo edits the audio herself, making room for silences during the voiceovers so that viewers can reflect fully on what they’ve heard.
In “El lugar más pequeño” she combined images of daily goings-on in the village with the testimonies of aging inhabitants about murders, hiding in caves and acts of resistance. In “Tempestad” shots of anonymous people riding on buses paint a picture of ordinary life—but the normality is tinged by the menace described in the voiceovers. Her approach in “Noche de Fuego” is similar, depicting a world both intimate and off-kilter.
“Noche de Fuego” will enjoy a global platform when it is released in cinemas and on Netflix this autumn. “The only thing I can say is that I’m very happy that the movie will be seen in different countries and exposed to different audiences,” Ms Huezo says. While doing post-production on the film in Brazil, she met people who still did not know or believe that girls were being kidnapped in Mexico. But the threat of violence was never fiction to Ms Huezo: she couldn’t shoot in the book’s original setting, the state of Guerrero, as it was too dangerous.
Ms Huezo will screen “Noche de Fuego” at festivals in New York and London; it may pick up more awards. She is also in production on her next project, “El Eco” (“The Echo”), again set in a remote village in Mexico but returning to documentary, whereby she will follow three families for a year. “It’s important for me to go back to this form,” she says. “It’s what feeds me.” ■