![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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