Tatiana Huezo’s ‘Prayers for The Stolen’ Is A Magnificently Lucid Portrait of Girlhood Under Siege [Cannes Review]

Tatiana Huezo’s eye for lyrical truth has materialized in documentaries like “Tempestad” or “The Tiniest Place,” works that penetrate some of the most tenebrous corners in recent Latin American history with shimmering compassion. Her stance as an acute observer of the people that survive and persevere through tumultuous sociopolitical and economically disadvantaged contexts produces thought-provoking filmic meditations.

The Salvadoran-born Mexican director has now applied her reflective gaze to fiction for the first time with “Prayers for the Stolen” (“Noche de Fuego“), her interpretation of the novel by Jennifer Clement that fits within her line of interest. A magnificently lucid portrait of girlhood under siege, the film is a slice of life portrayal accentuated with unassuming visual poetry. Violence itself is never frontal but a looming force that underscores every scene.

Short haircuts and underground hiding spots are common parts of every girl’s childhood in a small Mexican town in the state of Jalisco where the federal government and the cartels are essentially one and the same. Stripped of most physical indicators of femininity, girls know this is a defense mechanism to deter unscrupulous men from abducting them. In spite of the perilous reality, Ana (played as a child by Ana Cristina Ordóñez González) and her two best friends: Maria (Bloca Itzel Pérez), born with a harelip and more precocious Paula (Camila Gaal), roam their rural town drawing magic from the controlled mayhem around.

Told purposefully from the girls’ perspective, what happens to those taken by the army or the drug lords is never spoken about. We can infer their awful fate, but no one dares say it out loud. Huezo and cinematographer Dariela Ludlow navigate the space, caught between nature and manmade constructions, almost like a naturalistic fairytale. Images of insects crawling on vegetation or cows inside an empty house provide a childlike wonder that’s further exemplified by the friends’ quasi-telepathic bond.

The trio begets a space for solace and safety by huddling together and playing at reading each other’s minds. They need it because outside of their bubble of solidarity, harshness preys. Huezo’s depiction of the rite of passage for girls in this town, the day their long hair is chopped for a more masculine look, is devastating. As the locks drop to the ground, so does part of Ana’s innocence and her agency to decide over her body. Silent powerlessness engulfs the sequence.

Expansive, the filmmaker’s adaptation covers a time period. The first half of “Prayers,” the girls’ younger years, transitions into their adolescence with a different cast. This temporal jump reaffirms that the oppressive power dynamic this population lives under has endured. Sooner or later everyone, including Ana’s strong-willed mother Rita (a fierce Mayra Batalla), is recruited to work for the cartels bleeding the bulbs of poppy flowers for opium.

Expansive, the filmmaker’s adaptation covers a time period. In the first half of ‘Prayers,’ the girls’ younger years transition into their adolescence with a different cast. This temporal jump reaffirms that the oppressive power dynamic this population lives under has endured. Sooner or later, everyone, including Ana’s strong-willed mother Rita (a fierce Mayra Batalla), is recruited to work for the cartels bleeding the bulbs of poppy flowers for opium.

Expansive, the filmmaker’s adaptation covers a time period. In the first half of “Prayers,” the girls’ younger years transition into their adolescence with a different cast. This temporal jump reaffirms that the oppressive power dynamic this population lives under has endured. Sooner or later, everyone, including Ana’s strong-willed mother Rita (a fierce Mayra Batalla), is recruited to work for the cartels bleeding the bulbs of poppy flowers for opium.

Army planes fumigate other crops, but never the precious raw material for the fabrication of illegal substances, evincing their longstanding collusion. This is not news in a country that has lost nearly all faith in the institutions. Although the leading figures are the young women, Maria’s brother Margarito (José Estrada/Julián Guzmán Girón), who grew up with them, exemplifies how teenage males are exploited in this gruesome and corrupt system, a topic that another fantastic recent Mexican title, “Identifying Feature,” addresses. Without much a choice, he plays his part in hopes of protecting his family. To Huezo’s credit, Margarito’s harmless fondness for Ana is present throughout but doesn’t become a focal point. She expertly maneuvers the community’s subplots.

As teenage Anna, actress Marya Membreño believable performs naïve rebelliousness. Hypothetically, she is aware of why her mother overprotects her and the reasoning behind the measures taken to ensure the safety of young women. Yet, her ebullient impetus to experience freedom collides with those parameters. Anna initiates a dance with Margarito and impresses him with her shooting skills. There’s a fearlessness to her that’s vibrant, but that may put her in harm’s way in this homeland. Convincingly, Giselle Barrera Sán Hernández and Alejandra Camacho become older versions of Maria and Paula in the film’s latter part.

Huezo’s direction of her ensemble cast, especially of Membreño, demonstrates her potential for mining honesty from the inorganic nature of fiction. While there’s obviously manipulation in documentary, here, the quality of realism comes from the scene’s setups and her newly developed talent to collaborate and construct with actors instead of subjects existing in their own realities.

Some shots are perfectly composed, like one of teenage Anna and Juana playing inside a dilapidated building that frames them precisely through a hole in a wall. In contrast, others feel more freewheeling, for example, the three girls reveling in their sisterhood as they swim in the river. Huezo’s imagery in “Prayers” often comes across as simultaneously otherworldly and completely feasible: families congregate on a hill where they can get a signal to phone their loved ones who migrated to the United States—as in the case of Ana’s father. The shot calls to mind the grounded magical realism of Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Without over-explaining, Huezo touches on the helplessness and impotence that has infected many of the most vulnerable segments of Mexican society at the mercy of the many factions of the ongoing drug war. A hair salon that’s able to operate because the owner pays the villains for protection, teachers eager to offer an escape through education but who are driven out when their lives are threatened, or a nerve-racking confrontation where Rita stares death in the eye, are all piece of information that maintains a suffocating tension.

Overall, however, the drama is under the surface with few outbursts because we are immersed in the psyche of Anna and her friends and not in that of the adults that have to see the horror up close. We are just as sheltered as they are and learn the same details as the unhurried plot moves along. Therefore, the film could seem anticlimactic even though it offers a disheartening but inevitable resolution.

The weight of the piece lies in the way Ana looks at Margarito as the fire rages on a terrible night, or as she stares at her drunk and frustrated mother asleep on a couch, or when she runs through the road to learn the news she always feared. Ana’s realization that her liberty is an illusion in a place with no safety guarantees is a gutting statement on how the systems of fear and destruction assault women in most societies worldwide, being Mexico one of the most extreme cases. As a reckoning on the prevalent issue of femicides washes over the country, this film presents a vivid study of that terrifying coming-of-age: a girl discovering womanhood is a target for brutality.

In her previous work “Tempestad,” a masterpiece of non-fiction, Huezo had already said a prayer for the stolen, as that effort followed two women: one who’d been wrongly incarcerated and another searching for a disappeared loved one. Even “The Tiniest Place,” on the aftermath of civil war in her native El Salvador, appealed to the memory of those gone. “Prayers” stands as a continuation of her brilliance and expands it to a storytelling format with distinct tools for engagement, yet the impact is just as searing. Huezo’s ardor for humanistic examination loses no fire in this metamorphosis. [A]

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