The following short film Narcocorrido from writer/director Ryan Prows came to my attention thanks to an interview piece with Prows over at Cinephilia and Beyond.
The title of the 23-minute short hints at what’s to come and is a word I was originally unfamiliar with. In a 2013 Daily News piece it describes a “narcocorrido” as “a musical genre and multi-million dollar industry that peddles songs glorifying the surreal violence of warring drug syndicates and the bling, women, drugs and weapons that punctuate their lives.” A guess a crude comparison would be to call it the Mexican equivalent of “gangsta rap” and Prows’ film gets to the bloody reality of it all.
Opening on a police officer, puking her bloody gets out, she eventually follows a truck pumping Mexican music as it rolls around the dirt hills outside of Yuma County, Arizona. Once she pulls the truck over things take a turn for the worse as we learn this gravely ill officer isn’t making a standard stop, but instead intends to rob the truck, which she believes is loaded with drug money. Things, obviously, escalate.
Give the short a watch directly below and leave your thoughts in the comments.
[vimeo id=”33846498″ width=”640″]
The Narcocorrido, a drug ballad in the Mexican folk-music tradition, mythicizes seedy border tales of the modern west: drug lords, human trafficking, arrests, betrayals, shootouts and murder.
Naija Dillion is a Yuma County Sheriff’s deputy, an outsider and minority in her community. Gravely ill, Naija robs a notorious cartel shipment in a last-ditch scramble for survival.
When the robbery spirals out of control, Naija finds herself caught up in a narcocorrido made real. Can she recognize her shared desperation with the traffickers, men with families in danger if they don’t succeed in their delivery, or will she suppress her own humanity to live?
