Visions du Réel’s 2021 Ateliers are dedicated to Tatiana Huezo and Pietro Marcello

Through a body of work as committed as it is personal, Tatiana Huezo paints the portrait of her country and relentlessly denounces the mechanisms of terror, employing a poetic and sensitive cinematographical language, which succeeds, with great decency, in giving substance to absence, violence and suffering.

Born in Salvador and living in Mexico, Tatiana Huezo graduated from the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (CCC) film school and holds a Master’s in Documentary Filmmaking from Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University. After her first attempts—short films such as Arido (1992), Familia (2004) or Sueño (2005)—she gained international renown with her first feature-length film, El lugar más pequeño (2011), presented as an international premiere at Visions du Réel in 2011 where it won the Grand Prix for the Best Feature-length Film.

Building on this success, the film was programmed by more than 80 festivals around the world. Then, following the short film Ausencias (2015), she directed Tempestad (2016), which was presented as a world premiere at the Berlinale (Forum section) where it won four Ariel awards—presented by the Mexican Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences.

Over recent years, she has taught film in various international academic contexts and also written the book El Viaje, rutas y caminos andados para llegar a otro planeta, in which eight documentary filmmakers describe their creative processes. In 2021, she is unveiling her first fictional film, Noche de fuego.

As for Pietro Marcello, his work, falling within a formally audacious and sensual contemporary Italian cinematographical—often non-fiction—scene (Alice Rohrwacher, Michelangelo Frammartino, Roberto Minervini, etc.), is imbued with his profound interest for literature and art history, constantly reinventing cinematographical codes with humanism, romanticism and great artistic freedom.

Pietro Marcello was born in Caserta in Campania in 1976. He began by studying painting at the Naples Academy of Fine Arts. Self-taught, he cut his teeth on “participative videos” shot in the prisons where he was teaching. From 1998 to 2003, he programmed the Cinedamm film events, at the Damm centre in the Montesanto district, of which he was one of the founding members. It was in this context that he directed his first short films Carta and Scampia (2003). In 2004, he completed Il cantiere, a documentary that won the Libero Bizzarri Prize.

The following year, he directed La Baracca. His first feature-length film, Crossing the Line (Il passaggio della linea, 2007), won many accolades. But it was in 2009 with The Mouth of the Wolf (La bocca del lupo), which won awards at Turin and at the Berlinale (Forum section), that he gained international recognition. In 2011, he paid tribute to Artavazd Peleshian in The Silence of Pelesjan (Il silenzio di Pelesjan), while Lost and Beautiful (Bella e perduta, 2015), in selection at Locarno and the Grand prix du Jury at La Roche-sur-Yon, brought him a wider audience. In 2019, Martin Eden, adapted from the eponymous Jack London novel, was presented at the Venice Film Festival and met with great critical acclaim.

Moreover, the film embodies the move of Marcello’s work to fiction, while keeping a very strong link with the documentary genre. His new opus For Lucio (Per Lucio) will be presented at the 2021 Berlinale.