Tatiana Huezo’s film, adapted from the 2012 novel by Jennifer Clement, was Mexico’s official submission for the Oscars: a complex, subtle, tender and heart-rending story of a young girl’s upbringing in a village menaced by the drug cartels and people traffickers.

Ana (Ana Cristina Ordóñez González) is a kid whose careworn mum Rita (Mayra Batalla) tells her to cut her hair short and pretend to be a boy – because the gangsters like to take young girls away for reasons she needn’t explain. One girl nearby has already been taken away, her parents gone, too, and her abandoned home is eerily empty, with toys and clothes strewn all over the floor. Rita even shows Ana the shallow grave with branches over it in the back yard she has to hide in if the worst happens and these rapists show up: a disquieting sequence that is almost like a voodoo fake funeral scene, to ward off the unthinkable. Ana’s friend Paula (Camila Gaal) has to cut her hair, too, but their other friend María (Blanca Itzel Pérez) doesn’t, because her cleft lip means that she is spared the violent misogyny.

As the years go by, these almost telepathically close friends grow to be teens, now played by different actors: Marya Membreño, Alejandra Camacho and Giselle Barrera Sánchez, becoming adults with the same cares and the same learned wary silence as their parents. But now Ana has a crush on María’s brother Margarito (Julián Guzmán Girón) who has a low-level job with the drug-runners. In this society, teachers are adored by the kids but mistrusted by parents for the way the pupils are encouraged to nurture hopes and dreams and self-expression that their elders, tragically, see chiefly as dangerous. Meanwhile, the federal government sends helicopters to spray poison over the poppy fields in which these people work, often harming the children. There is a sickening image of people at risk from vast forces over which they have no control, attacking them from overhead like capricious gods.

• Prayers for the Stolen is released on Friday in cinemas.