The Tiniest Place – El lugar mas pequeño (2011)

Directed by: Tatiana Huezo | 104 minutes | documentary

To explain the present, one must first understand the past. Twenty years after the official end of the twelve-year civil war, El Salvador still has the highest crime rate in Central America. According to research, mistrust in society is still high, and violence has remained a part of everyday life after the terror years. The documentary ‘The Tiniest Place’ shows a different picture. Of an El Salvador that is finally ready for reconstruction, that wants to lay down its arms and live in peace. Filmmaker Tatiana Huezo herself left El Salvador at the age of five, just before the civil war broke out in 1979. With this film she goes back to her native country to commemorate and remember, along with the group of main characters whose stories she has told.

The small town of Cinquera was seen during the war as a stronghold for the FMLN, the armed resistance guerrilla that took on the Salvadoran National Guard in a struggle for social equality and against oppression. Where the National Guard thought the FMLN rebels were hiding, they were brutally beaten: entire villages were destroyed; men, women and children unceremoniously murdered or taken. Director Huezo follows a group of people who have reconquered and repopulated ‘their’ village, while defying the remains of human bodies and wandering souls. Nearly two decades after the village was literally and figuratively wiped off the map in 1992, this group of old residents decided to return to the place where they had to leave home and hearth, where they once started their families and later lost them again.

We meet residents of different ages, each with a different story, different loss and other memories that still haunt them. Huezo never allows the people to speak directly into the camera, but shows images of their daily activities while the stories are told in voice-over. This stylistic device works to keep the stories somewhat bearable. For example, there is the sister of the late Gladys, who experienced the horrors as a teenager. And the son of the late Aníbal Ávalos, who lost his father to the National Guard as a little boy. Or Armando, who after all these years is still ravaged by nightmares every night and says he can no longer be helped. Perhaps the most moving story is Aída’s mother, now an elderly woman who lovingly breeds a chicken, but then mother of a daughter who, as a teenager, announced ‘to join the fight’. Moments later, Aída’s lifeless body was delivered to her mother. Yet she now says – in contact with her dead daughter – that she is happy with life. She enjoys the plants in the garden, a cigarette every now and then and chatting with her fellow villagers.

As in so many wars, retaliation and revenge over time is the main or even the sole aim of the violence. Young men and women joined the resistance to avenge a murdered parent and perhaps with their own weapons instilled cause for retaliation from the adversary. For this reason it was so difficult after the war to hand in the weapons and to build a ‘normal’ civilian life, says a young villager. For a long time he instinctively wanted to kill every soldier he encountered with his own hands, but that was no longer allowed. Although he says he no longer feels hatred, Salvadoran society is still strongly influenced by the two camps of yesteryear. This film doesn’t change that much; he does not offer a dialogue. This shows at what early stage of processing El Salvador is. Victims are only now able to talk freely about the atrocities, but there is still little question of public commemoration or rapprochement. Especially in urban El Salvador, the consequences of this lack of commemoration are still clearly noticeable. This is why the glorification of rural life, which the film shows en passant, feels rather utopian. We see the most beautiful images of great forests, of blistering heat and crushing rain showers; chicks hatch from the egg and calves are born without any help. Tortillas and tamales are prepared by the women while their babies are sleeping in hammocks and the men are out fishing. The film offers going back to a pre-war El Salvador as an option for the future. El Salvador is far from there, but the past can finally be discussed. That alone is why ‘The Tiniest Place’ is worth checking out.