Documenting the epidemic of female sex trafficking in Mexico, through the lens of Maria Huezo’s “Prayers for the Stolen” (2021)

Maria Huezo’s debut feature film “Prayers for the Stolen” (2021) is based upon Jennifer Clement’s 2014 novel of the same name. The film is conceived as a diptych, centred around the evolution of three friends Ana, Paula and María, in two chapters. The first chapter sees the eight-year-old girls with a boundless curiosity and an unbreakable sisterhood, who evolve in the second chapter to become young adolescents, still firm in their inquisitive nature and whose bond with one another remains unbreakable. It can be classified as a “coming of age” film in which the children are forced to prematurely come of age. The girls must make sense of the looming presence of the drug cartel and people traffickers who infiltrate their rural community, threatening to seize them from their homes and into the grip of the horrific sex trafficking market. Arun Kumar Acharya and Jennifer Bryson Clark call our attention to the prevalence of this issue with the revelation that “Mexico ranks second in the world in terms of prostitution of under-aged persons” thus enforcing the necessity for stories of the “hidden population” of trafficked women in Mexico to be given screen time.

The setting is a rural town in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero. Its remoteness from the “outside world" is alluded to by wide shots of mountains peaking through the line of clouds, which visually divides this community from the inaccessible, unknowable larger towns below (such as Acapulco, which the young girls of Guerrero are often trafficked to). The viewer is immediately introduced to this setting as a space of exceeding natural beauty, at odds with the callous regimes which occur within it. This is viscerally encapsulated by images of the vibrant red poppy farms. Huezo comments on the production design, revealing that each poppy seed was crafted using latex and filled with “nestlé milk” which, when sliced, releases a thick creamy substance, mimicking the sap used to collect opioid alkaloids.2 The visual appeal of the poppies is tainted by the knowledge that these fields are the setting of the “first chain” of the drug trafficking sequence. Therefore, the poppy farms are a sinister reminder that this is a community whose livelihoods are under the power of the drug cartel. The isolation of the town is further enforced as the cinematographer, Dariela Ludlow Deloya, arranges an image of the mountainous landscape, tinted blue by dusk and illuminated by the dotted white glow of smart phones, held to the sky by the women who congregate upon the mountains in search of phone signal. Unanswered phone calls to fathers and husbands reveals the dynamic in which this matriarchal community has been abandoned by its men, who have “evacuated” in pursuit of economic success elsewhere. This scene takes place in the first seven minutes of the film and thus, from early on, the viewer is introduced to the gender disparity which haunts the town, as the women lack the agency to move freely and to gain economic security.

Huezo similarly reveals the way in which girls are robbed of their freedom to explore and express their femininity, symbolised by the cutting of their hair - an attribute which crucially would make them more appealing to sex traffickers. In the “hair cutting sequence”, young Ana and Paula reluctantly undergo a haircut making their gender more ambiguous. The placement of this sequence is crucial in the unfolding of the narrative, immediately following a scene in which the girls have playfully applied lipstick, symbolising a blossoming femininity and an endearing curiosity about womanhood. The bright pink lipstick imposed upon the baby-ish faces of the young girls is a visual reminder of their looming adolescence, which brings with it the increasing threat of sex trafficking (85% of the trafficked interviewees from Acharya and Clark’s study were below the age of 20).3

Ana’s mother, Rita, keenly aware of the growing threat against her daughter, is characterised as stern and assertive. Jennifer Kiang coins her as “assuming a mean-drunk-dad persona at certain times”4 reminding the viewer that the single mothers of this town must simultaneously be mothers and fathers, accentuating the immense pressure upon the mothers to protect their girls from the cartel. Rita sternly polices Ana’s child-like curiosity in the lipstick scene declaring; “Next time I’ll knock your teeth out.” The following image of Ana scrubbing at her lips is framed by a hanging sheet in the background which violently blows in the wind in unison with her long flowing hair. The pathetic fallacy of this image serves as a sorrowful foreshadowing of the following scene in which her hair has been cut to become still and lifeless. Huezo places the camera at ground level, capturing wisps of hair as they fall to the floor. In the out-of-focus background the viewer can make out the soles of her feet, blackened by dirt and unable to reach the ground. This poignant image, only held for four seconds, is a brief reminder of a youthfulness at odds with the psychological complexity of her hostile home. Similarly, her clothing, a luminous, sequinned top which reads “Cheer!” serves as an ironic, sinister mockery of a childhood cut short by the corrupt regime of the cartel.

The viewer is placed in the inquisitive eye of Ana, starkly revealed by a scene in which she alternates blinking her left and right eye, the effect mimicked by the editing in post-production as the framing of the image on screen shifts from left to right, right to left. The viewpoint of Ana is further accentuated by the numerous low-angled shots obstructed by objects; through window frames, slight openings in doors, obstructed by bodies. The function of the “obstructed shot” is two-fold; it accentuates the physical vulnerability of the girls’ height, and also serves to characterise them as “detectives” deciphering the insincere narrative of their elders, colluded by their mothers’ attempts to guard them from the truth. As Maria Delgado comments, “The power of Prayers for the Stolen lies in what is suggested or implied: unexplained gunshots in the distance; the military cowering when the Cartel drives through town”5 Delgado’s observation is affirmed in this sequence as the intention behind the hair cutting “ritual” remains ambiguous to Ana and by extension, to us, as the infantilised viewer.

When Ana and Paula resist the haircut, Paula disputing “Why didn’t María have to cut hers?” the mothers suggest that this process is to remove lice and María is exempt because the lice dislike her “less sweet blood”. However, the second chapter clarifies the unanswered questions of the first. In adolescence, María’s hair is similarly cut short into a boyish style, immediately following the operation to remove her cleft lip. Kiang infers, “The unspoken assumption is that Maria’s disfigurement is a blessing: The cartel men won’t want her, just as they will pass by the homes of young boys. ”6 and thus, the implication is that the removal of her “disfigurement” establishes her appeal to the sex traffickers and necessitates the cutting of her hair. The false narrative constructed by the mothers reveals the dynamic in which they simplify and misconstrue the truth to form more plausible anecdotes, attempting to preserve the girls’ innocence.

Sound design is a crucial layer within Huezo’s film - its soundtrack the melodic hum of the three girls, which weaves the chapters together. One scene pictures the young Ana, Paula and María, freshly shorn heads pressed against one another, bodies intertwined, and eyes closed in concentration as they hum harmoniously. The gentle buzz of their voices enforces a sense of calm, enhanced by the dulcet chirping of birds. This becomes a recurring ritual which momentarily provides the viewer with space for reflection. But, in a film “vibrating with dread”7, the grating shrill of sirens, the barking of dogs and the aggressive engines of the cartel’s prowling 4x4’s, sound is simultaneously used to alarm and traumatise. In one scene, eight-year-old Ana is being “trained” by her mother to observe the surrounding sounds, listing “I can’t hear any cars or trucks. A cicada. No, a cricket. An owl, it’s by Water Hill.” The young girls have been conditioned to become acutely aware of their surroundings as a means of survival. Indeed, it is the sound of a barking dog which alerts Ana and Rita to the body of a girl discarded in a bush; it is the droning of the car engine in the distance which warns Rita of the imminent arrival of the cartel and allows Ana time to hide; and it is the absence of the dog bark which fails to alarm María to the coming of the traffickers ultimately leading to her kidnapping - her mother cries “The dogs didn’t bark! María! María! They took my daughter!”

In the hair cutting sequence, the absence of Ana’s voice, only articulating the word “Mama!” in a quickly corrected cry of defiance, accentuates her complete lack of agency as she is disempowered and “un-gendered”. The scene is layered with a heightened audio of Ana’s muffled cries. The accentuated sound of her weeping serves to align the viewer more closely with her; she is the audience’s surrogate. Her lack of dialogue also brings focus to her physicality as a means of communication within this scene - her motionless body in the hairdressing cape, restricting the movement of her arms like a strait-jacket, serves as a striking symbol of her complicity. A short- haired Ana is revealed to the audience in a poignant image of her, isolated in the shadowy corner of the salon, staring out of the window, alerted by the beeping horn of the military truck outside. The continuous diegetic beeping is mimicked by the extra-diegetic piano which begins to sound, fusing together the disparate worlds of Ana and the audience.

I would further develop Delgado’s suggestion that this is a film powered by its subtlety and implications, to say that “Prayers for the Stolen” can only truly be realised with retrospect. The opening scene in which Ana lies in a muddy ditch dug by her and her mother can only be understood later, as we see her utilising this grave-like space as a hiding place from the cartel. The wearing of hats and long-sleeved clothing while harvesting the poppy sap can only be understood once we observe Paula’s body burned by the toxic chemical, which the authorities spray upon the crop. The five-year gap spanning the two chapters gives the audience a crucial insight into Ana’s maturation. By the time she reaches adolescence she is cloaked in the matriarchal wisdom passed down through generations of hardship, becoming the complicit, hyper-aware young woman engrained in her by her mother. As such, the retrospective analysis demanded of Huezo’s audience parallels Ana’s process of deconstructing her devastating childhood.

Bibliography

Acharya, Arun Kumar , and Jennifer Bryson Clark. “Trafficking of Women and Vulnerability to HIV/STI Infection in Urban Mexico.” Genus, vol. 70, no. 2–3, 2014, pp. 87–109. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/genus.70.2-3.87. Accessed 11 Jan. 2023.

Delgado, Maria “Prayers for the Stolen captures the threat of an omnipresent drug cartel” , April 2022. Via BFI.org.uk. Accessed Jan. 2023.

Huezo, Tatiana on making Prayers for the Stolen at the American Film Institute Conservatory, March 2022. Accessed via the American Film Institue YouTube channel, Jan. 2023.

Kiang, Jessica “Prayers for the Stolen” Review: A Poetic, Profound Portrait of Growing Up a Girl in Cartel-Land, July 2021. Via variety.com accessed Jan. 2023.

O’Malley, Sheila “Prayers for the Stolen” review, November 2021. via Rogerebert.com, accessed Jan. 2023.