Vibe
After her mother disappears amid cartel violence, Estrella joins a group of children surviving in abandoned urban spaces. Wishes, graffiti animals and ghostly figures enter their world, but the supernatural never erases the real danger surrounding them. Issa López uses a child’s-eye perspective to make fantasy both protective and unreliable. The film’s magical images—moving graffiti, spectral guidance and fairy-tale wishes—sit beside empty buildings and evidence of violence, creating a visual language for experiences the children cannot safely process in realistic terms.
Watch for
- The children’s movement through abandoned buildings and streets makes the city feel like a fairy-tale kingdom built from real urban danger.
- Estrella’s three wishes are not clean magical solutions; watch how each wish creates uncertainty about whether the supernatural is helping, warning or simply mirroring trauma.
- Graffiti and animal imagery repeatedly animate the environment, allowing fantasy to emerge from surfaces the children already inhabit.
- The adult drug-war violence is often kept just outside the children’s understanding, preserving their point of view without minimizing what surrounds them.
Production notes
BFI identifies the film as a 2017 work by Issa López and explicitly connects its child-centered supernatural approach to the tradition of del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. The production uses limited effects to let fantasy grow out of real locations, graffiti and child performance. That restraint prevents the supernatural layer from overwhelming the film’s grounding in contemporary urban violence.
Trivia
- Issa López wrote and directed the 2017 Mexican film.
- BFI explicitly connects its child-centered supernatural approach to dark-fantasy traditions associated with The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth.
- The film combines contemporary cartel violence with ghost-story and fairy-tale imagery rather than treating the supernatural as an escape from the social setting.
Legacy
Tigers Are Not Afraid demonstrated how contemporary supernatural cinema can address cartel-era violence without reducing either social reality or fantasy to decoration. Its child-centered perspective lets ghosts, wishes and animated surfaces emerge from the same abandoned urban spaces as real danger, placing Issa López within a broader Latin American tradition of politically charged dark fantasy.