Tigers Are Not Afraid

Estrella is given three pieces of chalk by a teacher during a shooting and told they are wishes. Her mother does not come home. She falls in with a group of boys living on a rooftop.

Issa López makes it a fairy tale without softening anything: the cartel are real, the violence is real, and the ghosts are simply what is left. Blood moves along walls like a living thing and a trail of it leads Estrella where she does not want to go.

The children are extraordinary and were mostly non-professionals.

Del Toro championed it and the comparison to Pan's Labyrinth is fair, though this is angrier and less consoling.

Around 30,000 children are estimated to have been orphaned by the drug war, which the film states in a title card and then earns.