A group of university employees arrive in a small village during a hiking expedition. Once there, the local priest accuses them of being university students who're attempting to spread communism and mobilizes the townspeople to lynch them.

A group of local university employees arrives in a small town during a hiking expedition. Once there, the local priest accuses them of being communist agitators and rallies the townsfolk to lynch them. Based on true facts that occurred in the town of Canoa in 1968.—Salvador Monroy Ordaz <>[email protected]>

In 1968, four University of Puebla employees on a mountain climbing trip were attacked and beaten, and two people were killed, by the townspeope of San Miguel de Canoa. The mob violence was apparently incited by a local priest, who had been warning the townspeope that leftists from the city would be coming to kill him. Felipe Cazals' retelling of this real-life tragedy unfolds as a faux docmuentary. There is a narrator who provides context as we are shown a landscape of rural poverty and clerical power. Cazals made the film in 1975 as a metaphor for the massacre of students in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Mexico City district of Tlatelolco on October 2, 1968 a massacre the truth of which is still not known.—dennis kortheuer <[email protected]>