Miss Bala

Laura wants to enter a beauty pageant in Baja California. In a nightclub she goes to with a friend she witnesses an armed raid and is seen from her hiding place. The gang leader does not kill her; he decides to use her. She becomes first a courier, then a driver, then part of a trap. She wins the pageant along the way, because the gang wants it. Gerardo Naranjo directs. Stephanie Sigman plays Laura. The method is never to leave her point of view. The camera stays beside her; the shootouts are mostly in long single takes and shown only as far as she can see them. Like the character, the audience does not quite know what is going on. The narrative feeds on something that really happened in Mexico: the exposure of a beauty queen's connection to a drug gang was talked about in the country for a long time. Its politics are plain. The line between the police, the army and the gang is permanently blurred, and whichever side Laura crosses to she lands in the same place. It screened in Un Certain Regard at the 2011 Cannes film festival. It was remade in Hollywood in 2019, and that version was turned into an action film. Who it is for: viewers who like Mexican crime cinema and thrillers told from the victim's side. Who it is not for: there is no way out at any point, none of the character's decisions work, and the violence is constant and unexplained.