Prayers for the Stolen (2021)

Powerful, dark portrayal of life in the cartel-blighted Mexican hinterlands - Prayers for the Stolen review by PD

This brave film ('Night of Fire' in Spanish - for once the English title seems better) is a truly heart-rending piece but compelling viewing. Seen through director Tatiana Huezo's eyes, the hollow in the earth that Rita and her 8-year-old daughter Ana are digging in the ground near their scruffy house’s front door is a grave and a womb, a trap and a refuge. It is designed to fit Ana’s little frame, and the girl has already been drilled in the procedure for its use should Rita sound the alarm. Ana knows to fear the convoys of black SUVs that roar along the road below, and to fear even more the day one of them might turn up the track toward her home, but she doesn’t yet know why to fear them. Rita and the other women of this small, beleaguered rural community — who in the absence of menfolk working in far-off towns congregate in a beauty salon when not earning a pittance scraping the opiate goop out of poppy plants — seem to have a tacit agreement to protect their children’s innocence as long as they can. Thus Ana leads an almost normal childhood playing secret, giggly games with friends despite living in the shadow of the cartel, whose men occasionally descend on the village to kidnap young girls from their families A key feature is the strong, if sometimes strained relationship between daughter and a unsmiling, hardened, resourceful mother, together with an unbreakably close bond with her two besties, Paula and Maria.

While, again, she might not understand exactly why, when Rita insists that Ana get her lovely long hair cut into a boyish crop, and Paula must do the same, the girls submit, crying, to the chop. Maria, who has a harelip, is spared. The unspoken assumption is that Maria’s disfigurement is a blessing: the cartel men won’t want her, just as they will pass by the homes of young boys. That it’s best not to be too feminine, too pretty, too obviously unprotected by men is not the only facet of the film’s fascinating commentary on gender: Rita occasionally takes on “mannish” qualities, as though in this world of single women and girls styled to look like boys, a mother must also be a father, even if that means assuming a mean-drunk-dad persona at certain times. But dulling down the bright, dangerously noticeable edge of Ana’s incipient sexuality obviously gets more difficult as she gets older, a process Huezo covers in her most daring formal leap, which is replacing the three excellent child actors playing Ana, Paula and Maria with three equally excellent young teenagers. Now they are in a local one-room school, crushing on their teacher and visiting the rodeo where Maria's brother Margarito performs when he is not working, in a low-level capacity, for the cartel.

Most of the time the Mexican drug trade is an impersonal threat that hovers like the helicopters that with minimal warning will spray toxic chemicals onto the poppy crop and onto any unsuspecting passerby who has not taken shelter. Like childhood itself, Huezo’s film unfolds in episodes and pauses and interludes; the catastrophe, which inevitably comes, being all the more devastating for our complete immersion in the world it will threaten to destroy. Huezo and cinematographer Dariela Ludlow give us an immensely strong sense of place, with some particularly eye-catching scenes, both poignant and slightly comical, of a crowd of villagers splayed across a mountain slope at dusk for the location’s Wi-Fi reception, their mobiles glowing as they talk to absent husbands and sons. Huezo shows how alone the townspeople are in their plight, how vulnerable in their geographic isolation. but at the same time, Huezo is alert to the villagers’ ingenuity and endurance, as individuals and communally: Ana and her friends' simple experiments in telepathy are more than games; they’re binding themselves to one another, with creativity and love, and perhaps reaching for a true language, against a world of silences and lies. Powerful stuff.