prayers for the stolen by jennifer clement

“I put up with a lot from your dad,” she tells Ana. The lead character, Ana (memorably played by Ana Cristina Ordóñez González at 8 and Marya Membreño at 13), holds on to the idea that her father still loves her and her mother, Rita (Mayra Batalla), even though he no longer answers their calls. Huezo and cinematographer Dariela Ludlow capture the strange beauty, poignant and slightly comical, of a crowd of villagers splayed across a mountain slope at dusk for the location’s Wi-Fi reception, their cellphones glowing as they talk to absent husbands and sons. Most of their mothers are on their own, the men having gone north across the border for work, some of them eventually fading from contact with their families.

The salon where the girls get their hair cut serves as a kind of matriarchal clubhouse. Halfway through the film, Huezo jumps from the girls’ childhood to their adolescence, when they’re old enough to understand the peril of human trafficking and the reason they wear their hair short, like boys. That’s especially true of the coming-of-age story at its center, with moments of astounding emotion delivered by the six first-time performers who play a trio of friends at two different ages. But as a portrait of a besieged community carrying on as best it can, the film is keenly observed, its character observations lucid and engrossing. The drama’s narrative shape and momentum aren’t always as assured as its setting (with outstanding design contributions from Oscar Tello and Úrsula Schneider Núñez). Writer-director Tatiana Huezo, whose nonfiction films have documented postwar trauma in El Salvador (the exceptional The Tiniest Place) and the horrors of human trafficking in Mexico ( Tempestad), brings a documentary verisimilitude to her first fiction feature. Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)Ĭast: Ana Cristina Ordóñez González, Marya Membreño, Mayra Batalla For another form of trafficking, men from the cartel sometimes climb the winding road to town in monstrous SUVs in order to steal girls. Pesticides rain down from its helicopters, protecting the treasured crop and poisoning the people.

The criminal organization that grows rich from their labor pays them 300 pesos ($15) per shift.

The villagers of all ages who have gathered on that flowering hillside are seasonal workers in the poppy harvest, milking the plants for their narcotic gum and scraping the opium into empty food cans. “Liberally adapted” from Jennifer Clement’s 2014 novel of the same name, the film delves, with sensitivity and alarm, into the constant threat of violence for those living in the cross-fire of Mexico’s drug cartels, particularly women and their daughters. But beneath the bucolic beauty, as in many of the striking scenes in Prayers for the Stolen, terror churns. Bright red flowers dot a hillside in a remote Mexican town, and the air is abuzz with the songs of insects and birds.

Prayers for the stolen by jennifer clement