Manto de gemas

Dieser Film hat keinen Plot, der Halt gäbe. Geduldig webt er ein Netz, verbindet drei Frauen: Isabel kehrt im ländlichen Mexiko in die Villa ihrer Kindheit zurück; Maria, die Hausangestellte, sucht nach ihrer Schwester; Roberta, die Polizistin, möchte sich und ihren Sohn aus der korrupten Brutalität von Drogenkartell und Polizei heraushalten. Die Spinne im Netz ist die omnipräsente Gewalt, zentrale Szenerie die Vermisstenstelle: Die Kamera mäandert durch die suchenden Angehörigen, wir hören die Namen der „Verschwundenen“, der Ermordeten, alltäglich entsorgt wie Müll. Die Herrschaft der Gewalt scheint besiegelt, es bleibt nur, sie nicht zu beschweigen. (Barbara Kronsfoth)

As an accomplished editor who has worked with Lisandro Alonso, Amat Escalante, and Carlos Reygadas, Natalia López Gallardo has mastered a unique form of cinematic pacing, one equally committed to hypnotic rhythm and gradual narrative explication. She brings that mastery to bear on her directorial debut, a complex web of systemic violence and individual culpability. MANTO DE GEMAS explores life in rural Mexico, an environment beset with cartel activities, sudden kidnappings and the constant, violent degradation of women. As the film details these various horrors, it also suggests how they become routinized and banal, contributing to a permanent state of trauma. Eugenia is a thoroughly crooked police captain who, despite her own implication in the system, is terrified when she learns that her son Adán has become a low-level gang member for the cartels. Meanwhile Marí, whose sister was abducted several years ago, herself becomes an accomplice to further kidnappings. López Gallardo’s film weaves in and out of various lives impacted by loss and devastation, showing how criminality eventually becomes its own inescapable logic, consuming everything around it. A radical work of New Mexican Cinema, MANTO DE GEMAS is a tableau of absolute dissolution. (Michael Sicinski)

Natalia López Gallardo: EN EL CIELO COMO EN LA TIERRA (2007, K)