Trailer for Portraits of a Search (Retratos de una búsqueda) which will be screening at the Hot Docs Film Festival.
Natividad, Guadalupe and Margarita’s children have vanished into thin air, leaving them among the thousands of mothers who are victims of the senseless drug wars in Mexico. With each missing person, a family is left behind in a desperate search to get answers from a government that is suspiciously ambivalent. In one of the most powerful documentaries about the human casualties of the Mexican drug wars, first-time feature filmmaker Alicia Calderón courageously captures the harrowing stories of three women: one constantly retraces the last steps of her son, combing empty fields for his body; another gives up on her own government and travels all the way to Washington, DC, to plead for US intervention; and the last simply tries to forget the emptiness and raise her now-motherless grandson. These women’s stories are among the many that stand for truth and justice for the 26,000 missing people in Mexico today.