Prayers For The Stolen: Growing Up in a Place of Violence

“I’m not in any hurry to bulk out my filmography, all that matters to me is to connect with projects which touch my heart and to give them my all so that I can bring them to fruition.”

YES! Heart, passion and quality is the calling card of true artists and how Writer/Director Tatiana Huezo brings her narrative film debut, Prayers for The Stolen (aka: Noche De Fuego) to vivid life. Set in the mountains of Mexico, Prayers For The Stolen is a beautifully filmed account of three young girls raised in a community of poppy farmers, besieged by warring drug cartels.

Some Never Return

The film follows the lives of three friends, Ana, Maria and Paula starting around age 8 and then later at 13.

Young Ana (Ana Cristina Ordonez Gonzales) lives with her mother Rita (Mayra Batalla) in a poor, rural mountainous region of Mexico. Abandoned by her father, Ana and Rita struggle to make a daily living on Rita’s meager poppy farming wage.

They, and most of the families in the community live in fear of the warring drug cartels that fight amongst themselves for control of the fields and who steal young girls for trafficking. Ana is taught early on what to do when they hear the roar of SUV’s coming up the mountain roads.

Rita has built a dugout “blind” of sorts in the backyard for Ana to hide out in whenever the cartel comes near their house. It is a fear that she and every girl in the community live with on a daily basis. Many mothers of girls here cut their daughters hair very short to attempt to pass them as boys.

Because once a girl is stolen, they never return.

Source: Netflix

Finding A Life

The people of the community etch out whatever kind of life they can muster in the small town. Kids do go to school, but teachers that come up to the regions are threatened by the cartels and, sometimes, are expected to pay the cartels money to be allowed to teach the local children. Each resident has a ramshackle home. There is a large community meeting place and a makeshift hair salon. They rely on each other for protection, news and support.

The three friends attempt to have a childhood, playing games, swimming, singing and hanging out together. Ana develops a budding romance with Maria’s older brother, Margarito (Julian Guzman Giron) from childhood into her adolescence.

In All Honesty…

Prayers For the Stolen is a beautifully filmed, heartfelt and heartbreaking feature that demonstrates the resilience of the human spirit.

The stand-out performance of the film by Ana Cristina Ordonez Gonzales as 8-year-old Ana is nothing short of extraordinary. In her first film, she delivers a portrayal of young Ana with an authenticity that rivals, if not outshines most professional adult performances. With her angel eyes that speak volumes with no words and her sincere, earnest emotional affect in every single scene, she captures your attention and your heart from her very first appearance.

Her interactions with Batalla were so genuine that it transported me back to my own childhood memories of how I felt with my own parents as a sensitive child. You could feel her hesitance, fear, love, sadness and a whole host of other emotions during her time on the screen.

Source: Netflix

Another stand out of the film is the luscious cinematography by Dariela Ludlow. Ludlow paints a canvas with a camera. From the lavish foliage that embellishes the mountainsides to the tiniest of insects in the neighborhood and forests, Ludlow creates a sumptuous feast for the eyes.

Though the film is mostly outstanding, I felt there was somewhat of a lack of story. We did get to see their everyday lives and how they managed to sustain in such a chaotic microcosm, but there was no satisfying wrap up and there was a lack of clarity on what specific message Huezo was sending.

Because of this I had a very difficult time coming up with things to write about it. Perhaps she meant to leave it open ended, but it felt fragmented to me and slightly unfinished. I wasn’t quite sure if Ana achieved her goal as the protagonist, nor what precisely that goal was. It left me with an obscure emptiness and a bit unfulfilled. It was difficult to pinpoint exactly what was missing.

Still, there is too much beauty and richness to ignore. Huezo has created an alternate view of life amidst drug cartels. Instead of focusing on all of the violence, she focuses on the workers attempting to scrape out as meaningful a life as they can with very little resources, then centralizes further on the dangers of growing up female in this microcosm. This particular slant is fresh and rarely seen.

It’s the perfect film to stream when you’re tired of watching all of the overblown garbage pumped out of the mainstream film machine and, if for no other reason, to see a riveting performance from an 8-year-old girl with such authenticity it will leave you utterly speechless.

Prayers For The Stolen is currently streaming on Netflix.