Far From the Trees Lejos de los árboles

Adela, a Mexican sound artist, ventures across Peru from the Amazon to the Andes recording the lush and intricate sounds of the varied landscapes. Accompanied by a generous local guide, she listens to and learns of the endangered Indigenous languages that reverberate through the trees and mountains, recalling the sounds of the language her grandparents were forced to leave behind when exiled from Catalunya to Mexico. When news of her grandmother’s precipitous decline reaches her, reality splinters and the ghostly words and memories of her family’s history seep into her journey, the legacy of her ancestors becoming inextricably intertwined with her path forward.

Meritxell Colell Aparicio (Facing the Wind, Transoceánicas) returns to the Festival with a deeply resonant work that sweeps across continents and traverses time with the utmost grace. Captured in vivid super 16mm and with sensuous sound design, Far From the Trees is an intimate odyssey through memory and grief, exile and displacement. Here, the echoes of the past weave the sonic tapestry of the future