Prayers For The Stolen

Directed by Tatiana Huezo

Running time: 1hr51 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Tatiana Huezo’s Prayers For The Stolen

Prayers For the Stolen begins with an image of desperate, terrifying strangeness: in the scabby yard of a rural Mexican dwelling, an oblong hole is dug in the ground, looking for all the world like a tight, shallow grave. Angel-faced eight-year-old Ana climbs into it and lies flat, testing it for size and depth; apparently it’s fit for purpose. It’s not a hole for burial, it turns out, but survival: in this mountainside village, where a mostly female population barely survives by harvesting poppies for opium, young girls are regularly abducted and trafficked by men from the cartels that control and sustain them. During these frequent raids, playing dead is their best shot.

In her superb, skin-prickling first fiction feature, Mexican docmaker Tatiana Huezo (who previously made the marvellous Tempestad) tackles material that could be filmed as a luridly shocking issue drama — only to seek everyday life, with its pockets of joy, boredom and day-dreaming, around the hovering terror. Following the trajectories of Ana and her two closest friends into adolescence, it’s a coming-of-age story of unique urgency and scope, in which day-to-day survival is presented to them as a gift, though it hardly cancels out the girls’ burgeoning hormonal unrest. 

Adopting an episodic across-the-years structure that gives young life room to grow — but resists impressionistic rambling — Huezo brings her keen, compassionate documentarian’s eye to small but seismic childhood memories. In one quietly heart-crushing scene, Ana receives a severe pixie haircut at the salon where all the village women congregate, her self-image palpably dwindling with each snip. We’ve all been there, one thinks, except we haven’t: her boyish new do, too, is a morbid cautionary measure. Extracting performances of honest, increasingly calloused vulnerability from a remarkable young ensemble — most notably Ana Cristina Ordóñez González and Marya Membreño as the younger and older Ana — Huezo has made a film far tougher and more vivid than its slightly wafty English-language title. The original title, Noche del Fuego, translates as “night of fire,” and better captures its searing, mark-leaving power.

PRAYERS FOR THE STOLEN (NOCHE DE FUEGO) (2021) Written by Tatiana Huezo | Shot by Dariela Ludlow | Edited by Miguel Schverdfinger

Selected for Un Certain Regard at the 74th Cannes Film Festival