Beyond Emilia Pérez: 5 Mexican films that do justice to victims of the drug cartels

Oscar frontrunner Emilia Pérez has received mixed reactions from the film industry, critics and general audiences. On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 72% critic score – but a dismal 17% from viewers.

Mexican audiences have been particularly harsh. On its opening weekend in Mexico, the film grossed only US$74,000. Scores of moviegoers even demanded refunds.

French director Jacques Audiard presents Emilia Pérez as his bold yet compassionate take on Mexico’s drug war and the resulting enforced disappearances. The film, however, has been criticised for how it pities and condescends to Mexicans while lacking real understanding of the violence it claims to represent.

Those seeking to understand the suffering caused by enforced disappearances in Mexico would do well to look beyond Emilia Pérez. Here are five films you should watch.

Tempestad

The 2016 documentary Tempestad (Tempest), directed by Mexican-Salvadoran filmmaker Tatiana Huezo, genuinely engages with suffering and atonement in Mexico’s violent landscape. It follows the experiences of two women with organised crime and the Mexican justice system.

Miriam Carvajal, a former customs official and mother of a young child, is wrongfully convicted on spurious charges of human trafficking and sent to a prison run by a criminal organisation. To survive, she becomes complicit in the brutal violence inflicted on the most vulnerable inmates, such as migrants.

Adela Alvarado is a professional clown. She has been searching for her daughter, who disappeared a decade before filming. Despite threats to her life from police officers likely involved in the disappearance, Adela continues her relentless quest to find her child against all odds.

Both women are driven by love for their children. Miriam is heard but never seen; Adela’s life among circus folk unfolds on camera. This visually highlights that their stories mirror each other yet are not identical.

Huezo recognises perpetrators can also be victims, but refuses to turn the harm they have caused into an instrument for their redemption.

Devil’s Freedom

Everardo González’s 2017 documentary La Libertad del Diablo (Devil’s Freedom) also explores the theme of atonement for perpetrators alongside the suffering of their victims.

González presents a choral narrative of Mexico’s drug wars. Testimonies come from crime syndicate hitmen, soldiers involved in law enforcement, a mother whose children disappeared, young women whose mothers were taken, and a man tortured by police.

Victims and perpetrators wear compression masks made for burn treatment, ostensibly to protect their identities. These masks, however, also serve as a haunting equaliser that exposes a society scarred by violence.

In one powerful scene, a victim recalls pitying her children’s murderer after sensing his shame. She removes the mask following her account of forgiveness and hesitantly smiles at the camera – her trembling lips raising fundamental questions about Mexico’s struggle to heal from the wounds of its drug wars.

Identifying Features

Mexican filmmakers have long used fiction to “exorcise the pain” of enforced disappearances, as Mexican actor Giovanna Zacarías puts it. Fernanda Valadez’s debut film, Sin Señas Particulares (Identifying Features, 2020) exemplifies this powerfully.

Valadez’s restrained narrative avoids the stereotypical passion often attributed to Latin Americans.

Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández), a modest rural woman, searches for her missing son, Jesús (Juan Jesús Varela), who vanished en route to the United States. Magdalena’s soft voice and timid demeanour conceal quiet defiance – she refuses to be sidelined. We never see those she questions. We witness only the pain on her face and her stoic resolve.

Mexico is no fairy tale. In the agonising final minutes, Magdalena gains a son even as she loses another – though she cannot be with any of them. Life goes on in Mexico: Magdalena has found a grave to mourn at, and we mourn with her.

Prayers for the Stolen

Noche de Fuego (Prayers for the Stolen, 2021) marked Tatiana Huezo’s first foray into fiction filmmaking. The film follows the story of three friends growing up together in the mountains of Mexico, amid normalised violence and enforced disappearances.

The girls’ world is shaped by strategies for survival, with danger looming from both criminal organisations and the state, embodied by the army. Yet, even in this tense environment, they still experience the everyday joys and struggles of childhood and adolescence.

Drug violence contextualises the girls’ world – but does not define them. Huezo does not portray them as mere victims. As they grow, we witness how their rural teachers and mothers have provided them with the necessary tools to foster critical thinking.

Even though local criminals disappear one of the girls, we glimpse a future where her two friends may one day challenge the silence and brutality of the adult world. Despite the premature loss of many childhoods in Mexico, Huezo leaves room for hope.

Noise

Natalia Beristain’s Ruido (Noise, 2022) follows Julia (Julieta Egurrola), a middle-class woman in her late 60s. She is the mother of Gertrudis, “Ger,” a student who vanished while on vacation with friends. Confronted with bureaucratic inefficiency and state indifference, Julia is forced to “do the work of others” and investigate Ger’s disappearance herself.

On her journey, she finds women willing to risk everything for the truth. Among them, she discovers compassion and solidarity, from young feminists demanding justice, to mothers who, having also lost loved ones, guide her through the legal and forensic processes involved in searching for clandestine graves.

“You are not alone”, the women repeat like a mantra. As Pulitzer Prize-winning Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza reminds us, grief indeed is never a solitary. We always grieve for and with someone.