A work of gentle imagination and unexpected tenderness, “Tigers Are Not Afraid” unfolds from the perspective of a ragtag group of orphaned children in an unnamed Mexican city. On-screen statistics about the dead and the missing fuse the film to reality; but the writer and director, Issa López, isn’t about to belabor her country’s familiar drug-war horrors. Instead, she envisions how a child might process ongoing trauma by using the magical to mitigate the real.

The result is a dark fairy tale woven through with scraps of legends and folk tales, an urban nightmare haunted by the shades of murdered women and children. Our guide is Estrella ( Paol a Lara), 11 , who survives a school shooting to discover that her mother has not come home. Terrified to remain alone, and clutching three pieces of chalk that her teacher promised held three wishes, she finds refuge with a small band of similarly displaced youngsters. A stolen cellphone containing an incriminating video has made them targets of a cartel, forcing them to run from one crummy encampment to another. Yet the violence of the hunt feels less urgent to Estrella than the realization that wishes don’t always manifest in quite the way you expect.