By Brendan Boyle

The opening passage of Daughter of Rage outlines the world of young heroine María (Ara Alejandra Medal), depicting the scavenger economy centered around a Nicaraguan landfill. Director Laura Baumeister introduces the children who pick through the waste in a surreal image that shows them rising out of the trash dunes, set to a dreamy ambient score. The opening act that follows introduces María’s mother Lilibeth (Virginia Medilla), who raises puppies in their beachside shack, a tentative living disrupted by petty thieves and gangsters. On an indefinite trip to find work, Lilibeth leaves María at a plant where other children clean scavenged goods, a hazardous proposition, as suggested by a boy she befriends who complains of mercury poisoning, while the managers of this shop are themselves dependent on protection rackets paid off to allow child labour. 

Festival audiences will be familiar with the pitfalls of films about poverty, and Lilibeth’s disappearance midway through the narrative should steel viewers for the worst. Baumeister never plays this bleak scenario for shock value, though, opting instead for a steady thrum of unease as María perceives some dangers and remains oblivious to others. The girl’s imagination renders the landfill and its outskirts a zone of playful possibility even as her livelihood depends on extracting value from it, a strategic filmmaking perspective that slides between the hard contours of reality María observes (headlines calling attention to the landfill economy, which she cannot read, and city riots she glimpses on a television and through car windows), and the recurring dreams in which Lilibeth transforms into a jungle creature, becoming less recognizably human even as this imaginative leap allows her daughter to reach a kind of understanding.