Tatiana Huezo is a film director born in El Salvador in 1972, but raised in Mexico, where she studied at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (CCC), a film school founded by Mexico’s National Council for Culture and Arts. She also studied in Barcelona, at the University Pompeu Fabra. Nowadays she teaches Documentary Filming and participates as jury member of prestigious film festivals such as Documenta Madrid (in Spain), the Lima Film Festival (in Peru) or FICUNAM (in Mexico).

In her movies, she is interested in presenting the reality of violence, a reality very close to her. Her last movie, Tempestad (2016), is an intimate story about two victimized women, Miriam and Adela, with a political reading in the background. She also touches this topic in her documentary The Tiniest Place in the World (2011). If Tempestad portrays the violence in Mexico, The Tiniest Place represents the Salvadorean massacre of indigenous population during the Civil War. This film participated in more than 50 international festivals and earn over 40 awards, whereas her most recent movie, Tempestad, has been already shown at the Berlinale, the Sundance Festival, Karlovy Vary in the Check Republic or Sarajevo Film Festival, among others, and it has already won an award at the Costa Rica Film Festival.

Her stories are told in a very personal tone. In Tempestad she recounts the story of her very good friend, Miriam, who suffered in prison for a crime she never committed. In The Tiniest Place she goes back to her roots and brings to the light the story of her grandmother’s village, Cinquera, a place devastated by the war with a long list of missing persons. As Huezo says, “for the people of this town, of Cinquera, the memory is very important ... You could die if somebody saw you crying because they have killed your son and the neighbor would see you crying for your dead guerrilla fighter son.”

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María José Domínguez

Arizona State University