Entrevista con la tierra
2008 · 18m · Mexique
Directed by Nicolás Pereda
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
In a Mexican mountain village, ten-year-olds Nico and Amalio — and the villagers around them — recall the day they witnessed their friend's fatal fall, in interviews woven between documentary and fiction.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Pereda's doing something slippery here—is this a documentary or a fiction film pretending to be one?—and most scouts would panic at that ambiguity. I respect the refusal to choose, even if the melancholy sometimes feels safer than the subversion it's reaching for.
A formally restless meditation on collective memory and trauma that locates itself firmly in the Latin American essay-documentary tradition while interrogating the reliability of witnessing itself; the layering of child interviews with village voices creates a palimpsest effect that recalls both Kiarostami and the structural documentary lineage.
The crucial move is how Pereda lets the children's fractured, contradictory recollections speak without smoothing them into narrative coherence—that commitment to keeping the footage rough and the timelines unstable elevates what could've been a conventional grief story into something genuinely unsettling on a shoestring.
Reviews
Grâce à une mise en forme des plus audacieuses, le réalisateur offre une œuvre poétique sur le deuil, la culpabilité et les possibilités de les surmonter malgré l'incommunicabilité flagrante existant parmi les différents personnages. Par ailleurs, la musique de Marcela Rodriguez reprenant des sons et des instruments traditionnels achève d'apporter une touche métaphysique au documentaire qui s'engouffre dans les mystères de la forêt en même temps qu'il cherche à capter l'essence d'une culture en voie d'extinction.