Daughter Of Rage

It seems entirely appropriate that the fantastical should meet the harsh realities of everyday life in the mind of a child in Laura Baumeister’s debut fiction feature. Life is tough for 11-year-old Maria (Ara Alejandra Medal), who spends her days scavenging at Nicaragua’s La Chureca landfill. The acres of rubbish we see her picking her way through in the film’s opening scenes look post-Apocalyptic and are in stark contrast to some of the unspoilt natural landscapes of the country that we’ll see later - but this is no fantasy unfortunately, but rather the crushing daily life for many.

Maria lives with her mother Lillibeth (Virginia Sevilla), whose own personality seems to be created from the energy of oppositional forces. On the one hand is her fierce love for Maria but it's coupled with a no-nonsense attitude driven as much by a desire to ensure her little girl is tough enough to take on the world as it is by their breadline existence. At night she tells her daughter about a Cat Woman, who will come to the fore more in some of the film’s later scenes. Taking Maria’s point of view, we see how her world is mainly revolving around the puppies that her mother’s dog has had and how to convince her mum that she should be able to keep one.

Maria’s lack of understanding leads to a fatal mistake for the litter and one that will propel the film on to its second portion in which Lillibeth is forced to leave her daughter, for her own safety, at a recycling plant. The slightly uneven join between these parts of the film betrays, a little, the director’s inexperience but once she’s into the meat of this second segment it is, if anything, more engaging than the first. The owners of the plant Raul (Noe Hernandez) and Rosa (Diana Sedano) prove more benevolent than Dickensian - they might be putting the children to work, and not without some risk, as Maria’s new found friend Tadeo’s (Carlos Gutierrez) exposure to mercury indicates - but they are also surrogate parents on some level.

Baumeister shows how easy it is for a child to latch on to fantasy when reality is so tough. Maria listens to podcasts about the universe, listens eagerly when Rosa tells her a story about harbouring a magpie of bad feelings inside her, and finds escape to the Cat Woman in dreams. It’s here, however, things become more uneven as while this latter magic realist element fits with Maria’s mindset it is harder for Baumeister to fully integrate these scenes with the naturalism she employs for the most part. Alejandra Medal may be young but she has a strong screen presence that feels compelling and carries both toughness and the sort of vulnerability that comes when you don’t realise how vulnerable you are.

Among the poverty, Baumeister and her cinematographer Teresa Kuhn - who ought to be catching the eye of a lot more directors as a result of this - find moments of poetry. Maria, stubborn against the world as she floats off to find her mother or captured in magic hour lighting down at the beach. Although there is much to be pessimistic and, indeed, to get angry about in the crushing circumstances presented in Daughter Of Rage, there’s also a sense that whatever happens, Maria will do as her mother told her and keep her chin up.