Matters of life and death beyond mere borders
By Ty Burr Globe Staff,Updated January 20, 2021, 6:52 p.m.
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David Illescas in Indentifying Features. Kino Lorber
An austere, gorgeously shot parable of chaos and loss in modern Mexico, âIdentifying Featuresâ is an assured directorial debut from Fernanda Valadez, an audience award winner at Sundance 2020, and a tour of hell on earth. Itâs playing as a virtual screening via the Brattle Theatre.
Two teenage boys, Rigo (Armando GarcÃa) and Jesús (Juan Jesús Varela), leave their homes in Guanajuato for promised jobs in Arizona; they never arrive. Their mothers, Chuya (Laura Elena Ibarra) and Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández), go to the police but are told there is little to do but search the photographs of people recently killed by drug cartels and gangs. Jesús is identified as one of the corpses retrieved from a shallow grave, but Rigo is not. Magdalena heads out on a search that crisscrosses
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Some movies wound us so profoundly that once darkness has consumed their final frame we are incapable of shaking off the heartache. That’s the power of
Identifying Features,
as
painfully intimate as it is unsparing in its indictment of a country ravaged by a corrosive, entrenched evil. Making her feature debut, Mexican writer-director Fernanda Valadez finds a personal tragedy within a national one the murder or disappearance of thousands of people, the mass collateral damage of the ongoing drug war. She’s made a humanitarian lament by way of a slow-burn thriller.
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Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández), from Guanajuato, travels north to the border in search of her underage son, Jesús (Juan Jesús Varela). Two months earlier, he agreed to migrate to the U.S. with his best friend, Rigo (Armando García), in hopes of overcoming their adverse economic circumstances. In that time, no news of the boys’ whereabouts has arrived. In a sobering opening scene that set
Photo: Stills from Identifying Features courtesy of Kino Lorber
‘Identifying Features’: A Mother Embarks on a Dangerous Journey from Mexico to the USA By Lia Gomez-Lang | 19 January, 2021
This article was originally published by Sounds and Colours’s partner, Latin America Bureau. You can read the original
Disappearances of young people in Mexico have grown exponentially in recent years. The latest national statistics have listed more than 73,000 people missing across the country, of whom twenty per cent are children. This has sparked protests and searches for the disappeared. At the centre are mothers, determined to seek answers and action.
Fernanda Valadez’s film