Violet Perfume (2001)

Violet Perfume (2001) is director Marisa Sistach's exploration of the experiences of women and girls in super-macho Mexico City. Ximena Ayala is Yessica, a young, moody outsider who has been expelled from school for slapping the principal. She lives in poverty with her dim-bulb mama, who lets herself be controlled by a real boor of a husband. The boor has a boy, and the cad of a kid ruthlessly abuses poor Ximena. No one believes her, though, because the world she lives in sees intimate assaults as a two-to-tango affair. Ximena finds comfort in a friendship with Miriam (Nancy Gutiérrez), but will their relationship survive? The first in the Tragaluz Trilogy of Cruelty on teenage violence, Violet Perfume is, says the BBC, "filled with images of exclusion and entrapment. The repeated framing of figures behind windows, fences, and bars help convey the separation of the characters from a cruel adult world."