Tania Hermida’s début, How Much Further/Qué tan lejos, which she also wrote and coproduced, is Ecuador’s contribution to the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s tenth Latinbeat.  The annual series continues to combine work from the three peces gordos of Brazil, Mexico and Argentina with refreshing newcomers from such other, overlooked countries, even to shorts from El Salvador and Guatemala as the first-ever entries from Central America.

One of an impressive seven women directors in this year’s nicely mixed bag, director Hermida turns to the tradition of road movies for the story in which, for different purposes, two outwardly dissimilar women journey towards one physical destination only to discover spiritual bonds between them. The Hispanic world through which they travel is male, but the vision is fair enough to embrace harmless braggart would-be womanizers (including Andrés, played by Fausto Miño), kind Indians on motorcycles, a tolerant black at a beach bar and, most of all, a tall gaunt bearded philosopher with the common Spanish name of Jesús (Pancho Aguirre) who carries his maternal grandmother’s ashes home to native earth.

Backed by Armando Salazar cinematography evoking the world’s second highest cordillera but not overpowering basic story or character, local university student Tristeza (Cecilia Vallejo) and Esperanza (Tania Martínez) overlap on a bus from capital Quito south along the Andes backbone to colonial Cuenca. “If you can be Hope [as also common “Espe” is correctly subtitled], I can be Sadness [Tristeza, who casually turns out to be Marie Teresa],” replies the student, adopting youth’s easy cynicism as she travels to intercept the wedding of a reluctant boyfriend Daniel whom she imagines forced into a bourgeois marriage.

That the prospective groom is also known as Puppy for legendary whoring and love-‘em-and-leave-‘em exploits, is revealed through too conveniently overheard cellphone conversations before he ever appears. Most everyone else important, and not a few places, is introduced through a woman’s voiceovers that read such details as one would expect in the tourist guidebooks lugged around by twenty-seven-year-old Espe/Hope, a woman to Sadness’ much younger looking twenty-four and a gringa visiting from Barcelona, Spain. Except for the occasional peasant or children herding sheep, the landscapes are unpeopled, and apart from solitary shopkeepers the pueblos are deserted, their very names misheard even if they figure on highway signs.

During another in a wearisome succession of wildcat strikes from all shades of the spectrum, road traffic is blocked off, but the two companions of convenience hitch with a comical News of the Day TV reporter and cameraman to a pathetic burned barrier and then continue on foot, realizing their first common bond with a tampon.

Soon joined by lanky Jesús on a misty ridge, they head on, separating for a few hours but reuniting again by chance. Learning bits of Sadness’ quest, the other, older two question her, and force her to question herself.

Luckily, likely for budgetary reasons, places and characters are uncluttered and unobtrusive -- surely the few secondary players are non-professional locals -- as the three come to care for and help one another. No less important is the gradual uncovering of a Southern Cone approach, a caustic but proud loving acceptance of the underdeveloped country’s failures of infrastructure, indeed of just about everything. In a political, social and economic reality where nothing works well or for long and rules are to be bent as needed, there are many possible paths.

There is not a wild optimism for the future, but, drunk together, Sadness and Hope remember the words of suddenly disappeared Jesús and sprinkle the ashes which are not his grandmother’s any more. Her Latin Lothario’s story has ended, frozen into middle-class patterns, but, like her nation’s, the spirited young woman’s is open to new beginnings and possibilities. In false starts, lies wisdom to be gathered.

(Released by Corporacion Ecuador para Largo: not rated by MPAA.)