Santa Teresa y otras historias

In the northern Mexican city of Santa Teresa — 2666's fictionalized version of Ciudad Juárez, the provincial capital infamous for its series of gruesome femicides — Juan de Dios Martínez, a young photographer who works for a small crime magazine, is sent to investigate the desecration of local churches and, eventually, the murders of women working in a factory on the border. This noir-tinged tale soon begins to dovetail and intersect with a host of other stories recounted by a chorus of disembodied voices — some reciting literary passages, some giving testimony about real-life violence — creating a narrative palimpsest that blurs the line between factual documentation, lyrical observation, and fictional imagination. Adopting a baroque, heterogeneous visual language to create surprising spaces for reflection, Santa Teresa and Other Stories resists categorization as much as does its literary model, devising radical aesthetic strategies to search for truth and understanding in a climate haunted by paradox, indeterminacy, and doom. (Toronto International Film Festival)