
TEMPESTAD
Mexico | 2016 | 105 min
In a gloomy Mexico in arms, a woman’s voice describes the traumatic experience of having been unjustly arrested and then imprisoned in some jail controlled by a drug cartel. It was an actual descent into Hell: the heroine, whose face will never be revealed, is one of the uncountable innocent victims of the armed conflict between drug trade and government that has been tormenting Mexico for decades. Another woman’s voice joins: it is a circus performer, whose job helps her heal her own trauma. Her daughter was kidnapped by armed men. In her second feature-length documentary, Tatiana Huezo outlines a new geography of the violence in her country, showing a shady, corrupt Mexico punctuated with military checkpoints from the north to the south, lost in cloudy wastelands. Tempestad is a refuge for the voiceovers of its heroines, creating closeness to their stories of violence while at the same time taking the painful picture of a country in which women are the main victims of an endless war. (a.d.)