Buy Me a Gun

Julio Hernández Cordón's 2018 film is a dystopian fable set in a timeless Mexico where women are disappearing. A young girl helps her addict father look after an abandoned baseball field where the narcos come to play; she wears a mask and acts like a boy so no one will realise she is a girl. Rather than describing a real social catastrophe, the killings and disappearances of women in Mexico, the film translates it into the logic of a children's story. The visual language turns the low budget to advantage: bleached colours, empty landscapes and the games children invent make the violence felt without showing it. Cordón cast his own daughter in the lead, which produces the film's strangest and most affecting layer. The storytelling is deliberately loose; chronology and geography are never clear. Who it's for: viewers who like Latin American political allegory and independent work that sits at the edges of genre. Who it's not for: anyone avoiding content about femicide and children under threat, or who wants a clear plot.