As a rule I don't watch horror. The news serves that function these days. But, I remember enjoying scary movies so much as a child. I made Mama stay up with me to watch the late-night horror movie on Saturday nights, hosted on our Laredo TV station by cape-draped Dr. Zekow. He wore red-lined ping pong balls which were cut in half and cupped over his eyes. Dr. Zekow spoke in a Dracula accent. I sat on the floor in front of our black and white set, mesmerized by monsters and regularly peeking behind me for reassurance. My mother mostly ignored me as she read the newspaper.
Tatiana Huezo's sensitive and thought provoking film, Prayers for the Stolen, is Mexico‘s feature film entry for the 2022 Oscars. The beautifully photographed film was not marketed as a horror movie, but it made me as tense and forget-to-breathe-scared as Dr. Zekow's spooky movies.
The realistic plot of Prayers for the Stolen made the fear nearly unbearable. Black hats abound in the movie. Machines and dynamite blasts chew limestone out of the mountains. Dueling drug cartels extort small farmers and business owners. Children disappear in the dead of night.
Yet Prayers for the Stolen holds the seed for hope.
The mother daughter story of Rita and 8 year old Ana, later portrayed as a 12 year old, is set in the mountains of Jalisco state, where the cartels have set up heroin production headquarters. Rita supports herself and Ana working in the poppy fields. She has few other choices.
In a haunting scene of unkept promises, villagers attempt to talk with faraway loved ones by cell phone on a hillside were signals are sometimes successful. Rita tries to reach her husband, who's away working in the U.S., but has not sent money to her in two years. His phone rings, but it’s seldom answered.
The best friends world of three village girls is magical. When Ana and her two friends are very young, they play and explore the countryside freely. They share gossip, explore telepathy and are the same as any girls. As they enter adolescence, they discover they are in danger. In this anti-culture, cartel-ruled society, becoming a woman means you are ripe for exploitation. Rita and the village's beauty shop owner know the only way to protect the girls is to make them look like boys. They make up a story about the danger of lice in order to cut the girls' hair short. The girls are heart-broken.
At home, hiding places are prepared for the girls to keep them from being taken by the cartels. A friend from school disappears one night. Ana returns again and again to her lost friend's abandoned home to make sense of her vanished friend. You enter Ana's questioning mind as she surveys her friend's torn-apart home.
Sounds are important in the story. In a remote place where there is no electronic media available, an expansion of the natural senses is possible. Rita trains her daughter to recognize sounds faraway in the hills. Whose cows are braying from that direction? What kinds of birds are calling? And when the sound of Suburbans speeding on rutted mountain roads is heard, Rita and Ana know the drill. Ana is to leap into her hiding place in the ground, cover herself and keep quiet to escape the cartel.
Rita, Ana's mother does all she can to protect her daughter. She is the story's hero. The other white hat is the town's teacher. He represents education's greatest gift, the courage to question. His creative and inventive teaching methods bring students more knowledge than a roomful of Internet-equipment computers. He is a ray of hope. Why he and others haven't joined the cartels for better pay is the why of the film. It is the why of who we aspire to be, instead of who we become when we sell our souls to the highest bidder. The teacher's roles is essential to the town's future and that of its inhabitants.
It is no accident the Prayers for the Stolen struck me so strongly. Mother daughter relationships are to women as a strong trunk is to a tree. Mama's and my story had many similarities with Rita and Ana's story, though few of the dangers. About ten years after Mama's death at 78 years in 1995, the cartel wars in Mexico began and narcos took over the town in Tamaulipas in which she was reared. The cartel closed both the town's church and school. My cousins, who were school teachers, and their families were forced to leave their homes.
Because of how close to home this movie hit me, I'm grateful to the filmmakers for how beautifully it was written, acted, filmed and produced, but I'm most grateful for its message of resilience and hope.
