Colell's 'Far From the Trees' Debuts at Locarno
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- "Far From the Trees" ("Lejos de los árboles"), a Spain-Italy-Peru production from Allegra Films, premieres in Locarno's international competition, following Adela, a 50-year-old Mexican sound artist recording endangered languages in the Peruvian jungle and Andes
- Meritxell Colell conceived the film in 2020 after a close family member's death, initially seeking displaced or migrant sound artists before encountering Mexico-born, Vienna-based composer Angélica Castelló, whose own grandfather went into exile
- Colell drew on her own grandparents' legacy of silence, creating a fictional Adela shaped by migration and exile, with the grandfather reimagined as an activist-anthropologist who recovered native languages in Mexico after fleeing Franco's Catalonia
- Castelló served as both inspiration and sound designer, building what Colell calls "a sonic tapestry" from birds, wind, voices, music and a sewing machine, while Super 16mm memory passages were shot without synchronized sound
- Producer Mayca Sanz L-Higueras assembled the project from 2021, securing Italy's Exit Media, Peru's Animalita Cine and RTVE to complete financing via Ibermedia, with the shoot unfolding in five blocks from February 2024 to July 2025
- Colell became a mother during production and initially feared the fragmented shoot would yield "a Frankenstein's monster," but said editing revealed everything "fit together perfectly."
Why it matters: For Allegra Films, Locarno's competition selection validates a leap into a more ambitious international co-production model, while Colell deliberately centers a fictional woman in her fifties living abroad — a figure she notes is rarely depicted on screen — to explore the cost of building a life far from family and the intergenerational burden of language and memory.
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