17/08/2026 - Meritxell Colell Aparicio turns a sound artist’s journey through Peru into a sensorial excavation of inherited exile and endangered languages

Catalonian filmmaker Meritxell Colell Aparicio’s third fiction feature, Far from the Trees, has had its world premiere in the Locarno Film Festival’s main competition. Adela (Angélica Castelló), a Vienna-based Mexican sound artist and the granddaughter of Catalonian Republican exiles, is crossing Peru with Lucho (José Luís López Cama), her guide and translator. Their task is to continue a project begun by her grandfather, the creation of a sound map of endangered languages.

The undertaking initially provides the film with the contours of a road movie, taking the pair from the jungle towards the Andes. However, once the fear of death enters Adela’s consciousness, the journey ceases to progress linearly and begins to unfold inwards, leading her through childhood memories, grief and an inheritance composed as much of silence as of testimony. Adela’s microphones gather voices, ambient sounds and the acoustic textures of place, but her work also evokes the absences surrounding her family history. The sound map thus becomes a counter-archive, attempting to preserve what official history, forced migration and generational reticence have placed at risk of erasure. Personal memory and collective history consequently come to occupy the same plane in Far from the Trees.

Colell Aparicio slightly detaches from conventionally plot-driven storytelling and embraces a more contemplative mode, although Far from the Trees avoids surrendering entirely to the narrative inertia associated with slow cinema. The director combines sound design, psychogeography and multilingualism within a hybrid, essayistic fiction organised around a myriad of concerns such as endangered languages, Republican exile, mortality, childhood, plant life, politics and displacement. Its slow-burning narration and introspective register render dramatic progression secondary, as the film hovers between documentary and fiction. Colell Aparicio borrows observational and formal strategies from documentary filmmaking while arranging her reflections within a fictional framework of Adela’s life and reminiscences.

The film’s imagery by cinematographer Julián Elizalde moves between lucid, expansive landscapes and grainier, more volatile passages in which colours deepen, contours soften and bodies appear almost to be absorbed by their surroundings. At times, the image assumes a painterly density, particularly in the botanical compositions, where vegetation seems simultaneously tactile and uncanny. Gradually, Colell Aparicio assembles a fuller picture of Adela’s personal history, her bond with her grandparents and with family friend Paula (Teresita Sánchez), who cares for her 98-year-old grandmother, Toni, whose health is deteriorating. The prospect of Toni’s death unlocks Adela’s memories, deepening the film’s meditation on grief and inherited exile.

Both intimate and politically alert, Far from the Trees uses sonic and visual fragments to conduct a process of personal and collective archaeology across generations, histories and landscapes.

Far from the Trees was produced by Allegra Films (Spain), in co-production with Animalita Cine (Peru) and Exit Media (Italy), with the participation of RTVE.