Meritxell Colell's debut feature "Far From the Trees" (Lejos de los árboles) opens with a deliberate provocation: listen first, understand later. The Spain-Italy-Peru co-production premiered in competition at the Locarno Film Festival, introducing international audiences to Colell's meditation on linguistic extinction, exile, and the politics of cultural preservation.
The film follows Adela, a 50-year-old Mexican sound artist who abandons her life to journey through Peru's most remote regions. Armed with recording equipment, she travels from the Peruvian jungle into the Andes, documenting languages on the verge of disappearing. Her guide accompanies her through terrain that grows progressively more hostile, both geographically and symbolically. The expedition becomes less a salvage operation and more an archaeological excavation of memory itself.
Colell's approach inverts the conventional documentary format. Rather than positioning the viewer as observer of a cultural tragedy, she demands active listening as a form of witnessing. The endangered languages Adela records aren't presented as museum pieces or objects of academic study. They exist as living breath, as bodies of sound carrying histories of displacement and survival. This is cinema that privileges the ear over the eye, a radical choice for a visual medium.
The production brings together filmmaking traditions from three nations. Allegra Films, the Italian production company, collaborated with Spanish and Peruvian partners to create something that resists easy national categorization. The multinational structure mirrors the film's own preoccupations with borders, movement, and what gets lost when people cross them. Adela's own exile from Mexico frames the larger project of linguistic rescue as something deeply personal rather than merely anthropological.
The film's title carries weight. Trees root communities to place. To be far from trees suggests uprootedness, displacement, the loss of shelter. Yet Colell's film suggests that sound itself becomes a new kind of root system, an invisible network connecting scattered languages and the people who speak them. Recording endangered speech becomes an act of defiance against oblivion.
Colell's work arrives at a moment when cinema increasingly grapples with questions of cultural survival and decolonial practice. Films like Claudia Llosa's work or recent documentaries on indigenous knowledge systems have created space for non-Western perspectives in international festivals. Yet "Far From the Trees" distinguishes itself through its formal commitment to listening. The soundtrack becomes the protagonist. Words in languages most viewers will never encounter again carry equal weight to conventional narrative exposition.
The Locarno premiere positioned the film within contemporary art cinema's embrace of experiential form over narrative convenience. Festival competition slots at Locarno, Berlin, and Cannes increasingly favor films that challenge audiences formally while engaging urgent social questions. Colell's debut joins this lineage while establishing her own visual language, one that trusts silence and sound to carry meaning conventional dialogue cannot.
The film's focus on Adela's age, her status as a woman traveling alone through difficult terrain, and her compulsion to preserve what others abandon adds another layer. This becomes a story about refusal. Refusal to accept linguistic death as inevitable. Refusal to accept that memory must die when speakers do. Refusal to return to the comfort of the familiar when exile becomes the more honest position.
"Far From the Trees" signals the emergence of a filmmaker interested in how cinema can function as an archive, how the camera and microphone together might preserve not just images but the texture of vanishing worlds.