The suffering of Demeter. Representation of violence in the Mexican film Ruido

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the way in which the struggle and suffering on the part of a mother in the face of a daughter's abduction is represented in the Mexican film Ruido (Natalia Beristáin, 2022). The insecurity situation in Mexico is well known, according to the news, so that it is possible to establish a model for such a violence. The records of assassinations of police officers, political candidates, journalists and the forced disappearance of young people in Mexico surpass any other country. In this proposed model, the analysis takes as an archetypal model the figure of Demeter, a Greek divinity (goddess of agriculture) whose daughter, Persephone, was abducted for sexual purposes by Hades, god of the underworld. The unexpected absence of the daughter, the desperate search, as well as the lack of clues and traces, plunge the mother into a spiral of pain that leads her to an anguished search. The analysis proposes the “strident” as a category of analysis sequence, whose function is to regulate the narrative flow and the subjective construction of the character in the face of the irreparable pain of loss.