Talkies Community Cinema: The Echo

Tatiana Huezo’s intuitive and poetically forceful documentary portrays a year and a half in the lives of families living in the remote village of El Eco in the central Mexican highlands.

Life in El Eco is basic, elementary. Being the child of labouring farmers is an intense experience involving nature, animals and people, but also love, intimacy, illness and death. And education, at least for the younger generation. The children captured by Ernesto Pardo’s sumptuous cinematography are delightful, clever, funny and stoic.

The film brings together a variety of stories in a collage-like structure that highlights the role of women in a rural society that seems timeless. Huezo powerfully conveys the difference between natural phenomena (birth and death, sowing and reaping) and the patriarchal limitations imposed on the women, young and old.

An intimate, immersive portrait of a way of life – its rhythms, hardships and communal joys – told through the eyes of young people who rarely question it.

The Echo has won ten international prizes, including the Documentary Film Award and the Best Director Award at the Berlin International Film Festival 2023

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