MIFF Session 8: TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID

Under the credits we hear a teacher asking her students about characters in fairytales. The answers come brightly: princes, witches, tigers, wolves .... The teacher then tells the class to use those characters to write their own fairy tale. Estrella writes hers about a prince who wants to be a tiger. As she narrates it we are taken to our second major character, Shine, a boy of about ten with a burn mark on the side of his face creeps up behind a gangster urinating in an alley. Shine quietly takes the man's phone which has fallen to the ground and is deft enough to also side the thug's pistol from its holster without alarm. The drunken man staggers off into the night. We return to Estrella as she is finishing her tale in the classroom just as gunfire shatters the peace. The kids hit the floor like they've been trained.

The class is dismissed for the day. Estrella walks calmly around the gangland corpse on the footpath that the police have covered with a carpet. As she crosses the road two rivulets of his blood stream on to the concrete, fuse and follow Estrella home like a worm which crosses her house's threshold and traces along the walls of the living room and rests at one of her mothers dresses hanging there where it spreads into a butterfly shaped bloodstain.

Estrella, still in fairytale mode, wishes her mother back with her. A shadowy figure crosses a doorway and a decaying hand reaches the girl from behind, a small swarm of flies passes over her head. Estrella flees the scene. She finds Shine's boy gang who jibe at her but Shine recognises her as the same kind of cartel created orphan that they are. Estrella, believer in the power of wishes even though hers all seem to turn disastrous, has net the prince who wants to be a tiger but must first remember to be a prince. This is a Mexico City with an underworld of orphans, living on pointless anger and survivalism amongst themselves let alone the thing that Shine and Estrella have  that brings the gang down upon them. Really, the only warmth will be found in the fairytale morality that the kids themselves must define and defend.

This brutal film maintains a constant balance between our unease at seeing children in such unsettling danger and our own wishes of miraculous delivery. The magical realist trope of the blood thread, newly murdered people appearing to Estrella as though still living (even to the extent of a plush toy given a kind of life) helps here but it is so resolutely uncute, so strongly ugly that Shine's mini manifesto that tigers are not afraid as they have already been through the worst actually feels comforting even when Estrella counters that the tigers themselves lost parents and their jungle home.

The gangster McGuffin does carry a little more than a plot driver and the tension lies in the convergence of it and the inner conflicts within the children's gang. Finally, when we witness the cataclysm we are less inclined to relief than a kind of mitigation of shock. We are at least given a kind of apotheosis in the closing sequence but we also know that however beautiful this might appear that the world that created it is savage, dark and endless. Can't look can't look away: a fascinating film,