Meritxell Colell Aparicio • Director of Far from the Trees
“Memory must be received through listening”
- The Catalonian filmmaker discusses her transnational exploration of exile, endangered languages and inherited memory shaped through sound and hybrid cinematic forms
Catalonian filmmaker Meritxell Colell Aparicio combines digital images, Super 16 footage and archival material in her most personal film to date, which has premiered in the Locarno Film Festival’s International Competition. In Far from the Trees, which explores displacement, memory and transmission, a Mexican sound artist journeys across Peru while confronting the legacy of her Catalonian grandfather’s exile in Mexico and recording endangered indigenous languages. Cineuropa spoke to the director about transforming inherited silence into fiction, sound’s ability to summon the invisible, her collaboration with performer-composer Angélica Castelló and the film’s transnational perspective.
Cineuropa: Far from the Trees links Peru, Spanish Republican exile in Mexico and a Catalan family history. How did this geography shape Adela’s journey?
Meritxell Colell Aparicio: I’ve always worked with displaced and complex characters that possess hybrid identities. One of the questions I am most interested in exploring is how territories shape us, how places construct identity. From a cinematic perspective, too, spaces are an inexhaustible source for making visible the invisible, acting like mirrors that externalise the characters’ inner worlds. Peru was part of the project’s early stages, driven by my desire to explore quipus. The jungle resonated with a lost paradise, of civilisation and childhood. And the mountains, the Apus, are where the ancestors dwell, where memory resides. We were interested in exploring two intersecting journeys: a voyage involving contact with communities to create a sound map of endangered languages, and a journey back to childhood and one’s grandparents. We wanted the film to be an ode to listening, transmission and the memory of everything worth preserving.
How did fiction, and a Mexican protagonist, help you approach your own family history?
Far from the Trees came into being in 2020 following the death of a very close family member. At the time, I knew only that I wanted to address the inability to say goodbye, the inability to view a dead body and the emotions that entails, and to link this to sound. I began searching for displaced or migrant sound artists, and Angélica Castelló soon appeared. Her grandfather had gone into exile in Mexico. Years later, I realised it also connected deeply with my own life - specifically, with the legacy of silence passed down by my grandparents. I am not interested in creating autofiction. One of cinema’s great powers is its capacity to love the other, to understand it.
Why make listening central to a film about exile, inheritance and disappearance?
Sound is essential in cinema, not only on the narrative and contextual levels, but also on the perceptual and emotional ones. The image is always concrete; sound expands it. The capacity of sound to summon the invisible, all the other worlds an image might contain but which remain unseen, is incredible. A language survives only if someone speaks it. A recording is the medium that bears witness to a disappearance. It is the document that lets us know it once existed. But there is no context and no worldview linking it all together. Memory must be received through listening, so that the person becomes the channel for passing on knowledge and keeping it alive.
How did digital footage, Super 16 and archive material become one cinematic language?
It was essential that all of the layers of the film be interwoven, forming part of the same whole: present memory, family memory and collective memory. Super 16 felt essential to me for the realm of daydreams, memories and visions. There is something about the vibration of celluloid, its colours, rhythm and texture, that gave it the density I felt it needed. Having access to the UNAM archives and the family archives of the Calders and Artís-Mercadet families was a true creative gift. We were determined not to use the archival footage merely to illustrate a narrative; instead, we wanted it to engage in a more poetic and emotional dialogue with the protagonist’s journey. Editing is about creating constellations and establishing connections, and that is the most fascinating part.
How did Angélica Castelló’s biography and musical practice shape the film?
I was drawn to her because of her artistic practice and the fact that she is a Latin American artist based abroad. It was crucial for me to portray a person in her fifties who had left her home country to pursue her passion, music, and to depict a type of woman rarely seen on screen. Angélica played a pivotal role in creating the character of Adela; indeed, the film in its current form emerged from our various encounters. While the character certainly reflects much of Angélica, we were both absolutely clear that we wanted to work through a fictional persona.
How did the film’s international perspective shape the project?
I am very interested in working in a transterritorial way. In Peru, two factors were key: the presence of Lucho and his relationship with Adela. That concept of the guide, both physical and spiritual, proved fundamental to how we conceived the journey. The film brings many issues into play: the colonial question and its paradigmatic impact on linguicide; the defence of indigenous languages and their collective value, and the representation of multilingualism as a viable social reality. There is the parallel drawn with Catalan, found in an unexpected place and through unexpected characters, and the way the Catalan language, as it fades from Adela’s life, remains a deeply significant emotional space.
What do you hope international audiences will take away from the film?
I would find it deeply moving if people for whom the reality of exile feels more distant were to leave the screening and investigate the subject further: online, or by asking loved ones and mentors. Cinema, beyond merely telling stories, serves as a record of both our present and our past. The film speaks to the need to listen, the importance of passing things on, and how we act as both transmitters and receivers of memory.
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