‘Far from the Trees’ Locarno Review: Where Language Becomes Memory

Filmmaking and travel often share the same impulse. While one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other, moving through unfamiliar landscapes with a camera in hand has long proved an irresistible combination. The films of Spanish writer-director and editor Meritxell Colell Aparicio are deeply rooted in that idea of movement, following characters across uncharted territories and observing the ways they connect with the people and places they encounter. Far from the Trees is no exception.

Borrowing both its title and inspiration from Jacinto Esteva’s influential documentary of the same name—shot in 1963 and finally released in 1972—Colell’s latest film follows Adela (Angélica Castelló), a Mexican musicologist traveling through the Peruvian Andes with a singular purpose: to record and preserve Indigenous languages that are at risk of disappearing.

Accompanied by Lucho (José Luis López Cama), who serves as both guide and translator, Adela journeys through remote Andean communities, collecting stories, memories and songs while working to create a sonic map of the region. But what begins as an ethnographic mission gradually reveals itself as something more personal, with each encounter adding another layer to a journey that is as much inward as it is geographical.

Like Colell’s previous features, Con el viento and Dúo, this is anything but a conventional narrative. Instead, the filmmaker embraces a poetic, essayistic structure in which documentary and fiction constantly blur into one another. Different visual textures and materials coexist throughout, creating a film that feels less concerned with plot than with atmosphere, memory and sensation.

Memory and identity have long been central concerns in Colell’s work, and Far from the Trees continues that exploration. Adela’s own family history is marked by exile, and as she records endangered languages and preserves fragments of disappearing cultures, she also confronts questions about her own past. The further she travels into the Andes, the closer she comes to unlocking an intimate mystery of her own.

The film unfolds like an introspective road movie, moving with the quiet rhythm of a melancholic ballad and the patient curiosity of observational cinema. Adela spends as much time listening as speaking—watching people converse and sing, taking part in local traditions, and allowing herself to become immersed in worlds that are both foreign and strangely familiar. The struggles facing these communities echo experiences from her own family’s past, particularly the suppression of the Catalan language under Franco’s dictatorship, creating an unexpected dialogue between distant histories linked by the politics of language and cultural survival.

Visually striking and quietly enigmatic, Far from the Trees is distinguished by its intricate sound design, which transforms voices, music and landscapes into the film’s emotional backbone. Some passages are overtly lyrical, others drift toward the fantastical, yet Colell never abandons the ethnographic sensibility that has become a defining feature of her cinema. The occasional video calls with the remarkable Mexican actress Teresa Sánchez add another emotional dimension to Adela’s journey, grounding its meditative qualities in intimate human connection.

As Colell recently remarked: «The film is an ode to the beauty of languages, to their collective value, and to multilingualism as a viable social reality. Language is a form of thought, a way of seeing and inhabiting the world.» In many ways, Far from the Trees suggests that cinema can be exactly that as well: another language through which we listen, remember and find our place in the world.