Director: Tatiana Huezo

Tatiana 'Prayers for the Stolen' Huezo's lyrical and melancholy picture, while a documentary, is thematically similar to her previous one in its depiction of female solidarity in a patriarchal Mexican environment. The film observes three families in the small rural, appositely named town of El Eco, focusing particularly on the female children and teens. When the men do intermittently appear, it is often to remind the women of their subservient roles. Huezo charts their quotidian lives as they are put to work looking after animals and tending the fields, while highlighting female inter-generational solidarity, illustrated most memorably when a young girl is charged with looking after her ancient beloved grandmother, and she does so dutifully and tenderly. Elsewhere, born pedagogue Sarahi is shown giving lectures to her makeshift class of toys, and later her actual fellow pupils, on the extinction of species and the life of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. This setting out of themes could have been too on the nose here, but Huezo and co-editor Lucrecia Gutiérrez elegantly weave these sequences into the picture's broader tapestry. As well as a document of rural life and feminist solidarity, a watchful and elegiac study of how traditions, good and bad, reverberate down the years, or are lost to modernity. Ernest Pardo's cinematography ranges from gorgeous renderings of the rural environs to Dutch Masters-style interiors.

David Willoughby

Follow David on @DWill_Crackfilm