They Will Dream in the Garden

October 30, 2023
Otherwise Award winner Miravete (Meteotopia) explores the roles women play in Mexican culture and history in these 11 unusual speculative shorts. In the standout “La Purificación,” a frustrated young woman takes comfort in baking bread and preparing offerings for lost souls alongside the spirits of her grandmother and aunt. “Retreat from the World Outside,” which takes the form of a dossier of evidence and testimony submitted to a holy tribunal in 1779, tells of Sister Ágata, a nun accused of heresy for inventing a recording device to preserve the Indigenous languages spoken by the nuns in her convent. In the powerful title story, an old woman called only the Caretaker reminisces on her life as an activist while tending to a garden with numerous holograms of girls and young women, all victims of femicide. Tone and genre vary wildly: the ghostly “Music and Petals” and zombie tale “The Bridge” delve into horror, “The Art of Memory” pulls from classic sci-fi tropes, and “The End of the Party” portrays a postapocalypse. The whole feels oddly disjointed as a result, despite the through line of what it means to live in Mexico as a woman. Still, the individual stories are undeniably thought-provoking.