‘Far From the Trees’ Director Meritxell Colell on Turning Exile and Endangered Languages Into a ‘Body of Memory’

In “Far From the Trees,” (“Lejos de los árboles”) Meritxell Colell asks viewers to listen before they try to understand.

Premiering in Locarno’s international competition, the Spain-Italy-Peru production from Allegra Films follows Adela, a 50-year-old Mexican sound artist who travels from the Peruvian jungle to the Andes recording endangered languages. Accompanied by a guide and translator, she is continuing the work of her grandfather, a Catalan Republican exiled in Mexico. But news of her grandmother’s possible death fractures the journey, drawing Adela into childhood memories, family silences and fantastical visions.

“‘Lejos de los árboles’ came into being in 2020 following the death of a very close family member. At the time, I knew only that I wanted to address the inability to say goodbye—the inability to view a dead body and the emotions that entails—and to link this to sound,” Colell told Variety.

She initially searched for displaced or migrant sound artists and encountered Angélica Castelló, a Mexico-born, Vienna-based composer whose grandfather had also gone into exile.

“The film emerged from her story and those initial impulses; years later, I realized it also connected deeply with my own life – specifically, with the legacy of silence passed down by my grandparents,” Colell explained.

Rather than reconstructing her own family history directly, she created Adela: a fictional figure whose identity is formed by migration, artistic vocation and the simple fact of being often elsewhere.

“I was determined to center the film on the complexity of hybrid identities shaped by exile and migration –identities where the status of ‘foreigner’ becomes the self – and on the burden of that inheritance,” she said.

The geographical distance was crucial. Adela follows her grandfather’s footsteps while transforming his political and anthropological work into art, weaving a sound map from languages at risk of disappearing. The connection between Indigenous languages in Peru and Catalan exile was not part of the earliest drafts, but became the idea that brought the film into focus.