»A few years ago, I visited my grandmother in San Salvador and she took me to the town where she was born, Cinquera. The images and sensations of the place touched me deeply. I felt a need to know everything that had happened there.«
– Tatiana Huezo Sánchez

During the civil war in El Salvador, the village of Cinquera – a guerrilla stronghold in the uprising against the military regime – was razed to the ground. At the end of the war in 1992, the survivors returned to Cinquera to deal with the rubble of the buildings and the bones of the dead before reconstructing the »tiniest place in the world« and retrieving it from the overgrowth of the rainforest. To make her debut film, the Mexican-Salvadorian film director, Tatiana Huezo Sánchez, went back to her roots. Quietly but emphatically, she uses The Tiniest Place to tell the story of the human gift of being able to wake up from a nightmare, start life again and virtually re-invent oneself. Supported by wonderful photography from Ernesto Pardo, she follows everyday life in the village and describes how the survivors come to terms with the ordeal of their trauma. Indeed, they gradually open up to the camera and relate how they manage to process their experiences and memories.
The Tiniest Place shows how violence can leave traces and scars on people’s lives and how it can brand and change them. But he also shows that people have the ability to heal and look to the future.

Awards for ›El lugar más pequeño‹ (Selection)
Goldene Taube im Internationalen Wettbewerb, DOK Leipzig 2011 | Special Jury Prize, Abu Dhabi Film Festival 2011 | Best Feature Film, Visions du Réel, 2011
Audience Award, Documenta Madrid 2011 | Best Documentary Award, Festival Internacional de Cine de Lima 2011 | Best Mexican Feature Film, Festival Internacional de Cine de Monterrey 2011 | Best Documentary Award, DMZ Korean International Documentary Festival 2011 | Honorable Mention, Festival Biarritz Amérique Latine 2011