The New York Film Festival has announced the the 32 films that comprise the Main Slate of its upcoming 59th edition, which includes the Mexican film Prayers for the Stolen / Noche de fuego, the debut fiction film by director Tatiana Huezo.
Set in a mountainous town in rural Mexico, the film follows young Ana living with her mother, who works in the poppy fields harvesting opium. The region offers natural splendor and small pleasures for Ana and her two best friends, Maria and Paula, yet the area’s inhabitants are gripped by a fear that is for now incomprehensible to the girls: drug cartels rule the countryside, and they regularly kidnap teenage girls for trafficking, leaving their families bereft of hope or closure.
In her delicately wrought yet devastating first fiction feature, adapted from the 2014 novel by Jennifer Clement, Huezo charts Ana’s growth from childhood to adolescence, steeping viewers in both the lyrical beauty of youth and the creeping terror of adult reality. Huezo’s film features an extraordinary cast of young actors and intimate camerawork by Dariela Ludlow, breathing naturalism into a world of desperation and despair.
The 59th edition of the New York Film Festival will take place September 24 – October 10.
