Children who grow up in the lush mountain country of rural Mexico soon learn to spot danger. The dry rattle of a scorpion, the red, black and yellow banding of a venomous coral snake. And then there are the human threats: government helicopters that periodically drench the region in poison – a tactic in the war against drugs – and somehow never seem to target the opium poppy fields themselves, but rather the village and its environs.
Ana (played by Ana Cristina Ordóñez González as a child and by Marya Membreño as an adolescent) has been trained by her mother to map out the sounds of the night – the film’s busy soundscape takes in crickets, barking dogs, a cow without an owner – in order to identify the one danger the villagers prefer not to talk about. The locals call them “those people”, as if to name them is to give them power: they are cartel foot soldiers, equipped with jeeps and automatic weapons, who tear through the community, snatching young girls from their families to be trafficked.
