Meritxell Colell's "Far From the Trees" positions listening as a radical act. The Spain-Italy-Peru coproduction, which premiered in Locarno's international competition, traces a 50-year-old Mexican sound artist named Adela through Peru's most isolated regions as she documents languages on the brink of extinction. What emerges is not a conventional documentary about linguistic preservation, but a meditation on memory, displacement, and the body's capacity to hold what society abandons.
The film operates on Colell's provocation that understanding must follow listening, not precede it. Adela records endangered languages across the Peruvian jungle and Andes, her work functioning as both archive and elegy. The production from Allegra Films strips away explanatory voiceover or academic framing. Instead, viewers inhabit the sensory experience of language capture itself. The ambient soundscape becomes the narrative. Each recording becomes an act of witnessing rather than documentation.
Colell's approach reflects broader currents in contemporary cinema about cultural preservation and exile. Recent festival selections like "Song Without a Name" (Melina León, 2019) and "The Territory" (Alex Pritz, 2022) similarly center marginalized communities documenting their own worlds. Yet "Far From the Trees" distinguishes itself through Colell's emphasis on the body as archival material. Adela is not merely collecting sounds; she is becoming a vessel for languages that have no institutional home.
The film's tripartite production reflects how cinema about indigenous knowledge increasingly requires international collaboration. Spain's position as a co-producer alongside Italy and Peru signals European festival circuits' growing investment in non-Western narratives, though the structure also raises questions about who controls these stories and how profits distribute across borders. The Locarno premiere places the film within art-cinema frameworks that prioritize formal experimentation over narrative convention.
Colell's background shapes this sensibility. As a director, she has consistently worked at intersections of sound, movement, and political geography. "Far From the Trees" crystallizes these interests by making language itself the protagonist. Adela's journey becomes a physical manifestation of how exile works: the separation between a person and the linguistic home that shaped her, then the attempted reconnection through documentation.
The film's title carries layered meaning. Trees anchor us; they provide shelter, community, and continuity. To be far from trees is to be untethered. Yet the film suggests that voices, recordings, and bodies can replace trees. Memory becomes portable. This reframes endangered language preservation from a project of recovery to one of radical adaptation. The languages recorded in "Far From the Trees" may not survive in their communities of origin, but they survive in Adela's body and in the film itself. The archive becomes the last forest.
Colell asks cinema to function differently here. Rather than explain endangered languages through talking heads or historical context, the film trusts that sound itself carries meaning. This aligns with how contemporary filmmakers approach indigenous subject matter, rejecting extractive models where outsiders interpret indigenous life for audiences. Instead, "Far From the Trees" treats listening as reciprocal practice. Viewers must surrender comprehension and simply receive what Adela has gathered.