A documentary film looking at the life of a Wixarika (Huichol) Indian artist won the Best Mexican Documentary prize at the recent Guadalajara International Film Festival.
“Eco de la montaña,” directed by Nicolás Echevarría, focuses on Santos de la Torre, an “unknown” artist who created a mural for the Palais Royal subway station near the Louvre Museum in Paris.
The film follows Santos de la Torre during his pilgrimage across the 385-mile “Peyote Route” to his sacred Wirikuta lands, where he asks the gods for permission to create a new mural. Echevarría charts Santos’ creative process during the making of a mural that illustrates the history, mythology and religious practices of the Huichol people.
Santos de la Torre created his mural for the Paris metro station in the early 1990s. The work was inaugurated by then President Ernesto Zedillo but the artist was not invited to the opening ceremony nor did he receive any payment for his labor.The idea for the film came about after producer Michael Fitzgerald saw the mural but was unable to find out anything about it author.
After meeting Santos de la Torre, producers developed the idea of creating a new mural that would give Echevarría the credit that evaded him for his work now seen by thousands each day in the bowels of the French capital.
“We had a lot of difficulty raising money for the film and getting the approval of the (Huichol) Santa Catarina community, who are very jealous of their traditions and customs,” Echevarría said at the festival.
The producers rented a house in Zacatecas where Santos de la Torre worked for a year on his new project, while a crew followed him on his journey to sacred Wirikuta sites in Jalisco, Nayarit, Durango, Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí.
Their visits to the Cerro del Quemado in San Luis Potosí coincided with general protests at government concessions given to Canadian mining operations in the zone that Echevarría said “threatened one of Mexico’s oldest and most beautiful traditions.”