Past and present are in constant dialogue in Meritxell Colell Aparicio's film, as a Mexican sound artist recording indigenous languages and nature in the Peruvian Amazon also confronts her past and family trauma.
Language and sounds trigger idyllic childhood recollections in Meritxell Colell Aparicio’s deeply personal, contemplative drama “Far From the Trees,” a handsome reverie blending 4K, Super16mm and archival footage to capture the different textures of memory. Following a Mexican sound artist and her assistant-guide in the Peruvian Amazon as they record nature and indigenous languages, the film is a sensorial road trip of physical and mental meanderings that bisect life choices, parental ties and generational trauma. Aparicio resists drawing conclusions, privileging an experiential approach with its own rhythms, ambitious in scope yet intimate in focus, that could well become an arthouse sleeper.
Already with her first film, “Facing the Wind” (which premiered in the Berlinale’s Forum), the director was exploring the conflicting emotions of adult children in relation to their aging parents, reflecting interior struggles closely connected to place. With “Far From the Trees,” premiering in competition at Locarno, she’s delved further into the psyche and its triggers, negotiating the mind’s tricky associations with both pleasurable and painful memories, and while Aparicio only skirts the way languages form distinct aural and visual concepts, her highly attuned feel for sounds greatly contributes to the film’s impact.
Middle-aged Adela (Angélica Castelló, herself a sound artist and composer) is traveling through the forests of south-eastern Peru recording not only rapidly dying indigenous languages but even the trees themselves. Eager to engage with local populations and learn from her multilingual guide Lucho (José Luis López Cama), she has a certain gravitas that projects solitude, especially noticeable when first seen in the grey-blue light of early morning, staring out across a river at a restricted territory inhabited by uncontacted tribes. While we’re told that she’s a sound artist in Vienna, we never learn how she plans on using the recordings, possibly because that part of her inner journey lies in the future, whereas the film is focused on past and present.
Flashbacks can be such tricky devices, especially when depicting an almost too-perfect earlier time, but Aparicio’s skills as editor (together with Ana Pfaff), and her choice of shooting the past in Super16mm, convey a subjectivity whose resonance suffuses Adela’s entire consciousness. Born in Mexico to a left-wing Catalan family, Adela’s spiritual and intellectual formation came from her grandparents, while her emotional nourishment was the realm of the housekeeper/nanny Paula (Teresita Sánchez). When the eight-year-old Adela is first seen cuddling with Paula, their bond is so tight that our assumption is she’s the mother; only gradually is it clear that grandmother Toni and grandfather Emili, both researchers working with sound, were more distant though loving figures, still deeply affected by the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.
Adela stays in touch with Paula and Toni, now 98, via Zoom, but internet connections are unstable and she’s so wrapped up in her work and her reflections on the past that she’s not paying attention to her loved ones’ needs back in Mexico. Aparicio is not hard on Adela for this deafness, perhaps because there are so many links between the character and the director’s own history. As a single foreign woman living in Vienna, Adela has given up much to pursue her dreams, sustained by warmly lit memories of a quietly loving childhood, but she never seems to have questioned the power imbalance between her Spanish grandparents and their indigenous housekeeper, notwithstanding Paula’s status as an integral part of the family.
It’s not clear whether Adela will ever have an epiphany about this dynamic, or the one that separates her from Lucho. Perhaps were Aparicio to show such a change, it would be too pat, too easy: Adela’s silences make her slightly inscrutable but also more real. As the child of an exiled family, she carries their burdens with her, the residue coloring her own status as a Mexican woman living in Austria and further cut off from her roots. Towards the end there’s a dreamlike montage of uncertain efficacy, though stunning images of Toni and young Adela on a bed covered in vines and grasses are so mesmerizing that the eye wants to linger further.
Praise must go to production designer Anna Auquer, not just for that memorable sequence but the perfection with which she has created Adela’s crowded family home, where each object radiates meaning known only to its residents. Cinematographer Julián Elizalde brings an artist’s eye to lighting and feels equally at home with the diverse tonalities registered in both digital and Super16mm. An added layer is given via archival footage of anti-Franco exiles leaving Spain, silent witnesses to a rupture whose echoes are still being felt.