El lugar más pequeño

Synopsis

Civil war broke out in El Salvador in 1979 and raged for the following twelve years, leaving thousands of dead and disappeared in its wake. Whole towns and villages were destroyed by the army and literally wiped off the country’s official maps. In this film we hear from five families who returned to what had been their hometown to find nothing left standing. The old town square had piles of bones everywhere. But the townsfolk banded together and began to put the pieces back together. Life began anew among the nightmares and wounds of a terrible civil war. The characters we meet here, famers in a mainly guerrilla town, try to carry on with their lives, sowing their crops and tending to their animals, with the dead ever present in their minds.

In her debut documentary feature, which competed in the official section at l'Alternativa 2011, Tatiana Huezo tells a compelling story of humans’ capacity to pick themselves up, rebuild their lives and reinvent themselves. A tale of people who have learnt to live with their pain in a devastated village that rose again from the ashes. A remarkable first film which already hinted at many ideas that would later become recurring features of Huezo’s work.