A young mother runs across a mountain meadow with her children and they save a sheep from drowning. A girl cares for her elderly grandmother so tenderly that you want to cry while another practices being a teacher with just the right tone of voice, her dolls lined up before her as willing pupils. The fathers are mostly absent: as construction workers or tradesmen, they rarely share their daily lives with their families. In El Eco, a remote village in northern Mexico, life consists of the most elementary things. Being a child here is an intense experience from day one, involving nature, animals and people. But also love, intimacy, illness and death. And education – at least for the younger generation.
Tatiana Huezo has made a name for herself as a sensitive and poetic documentarian (e.g. Tempestad, Forum, 2016). Accompanying three families in her new work, the notion of meandering becomes an informing principle as she brilliantly weaves a host of faces and gestures into a kaleidoscope of unpretentiousness. Almost incidentally, she portrays the care-working matriarchy in a country notorious for its innumerable kidnappings of women and girls. A tender film that celebrates the grace of animals and the children of this earth alike.
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