Canoa: A Shameful Memory

Five people who work at the University of Puebla decide to climb a mountain over a weekend. The destination is La Malinche. The weather turns and they cannot go on. They want to spend the night in the nearby village of San Miguel Canoa. Nobody takes them in. The village priest has been telling his congregation the same thing for years: the communists will come, they will burn the church, they will hang a red flag. The bell rings. A crowd gathers. They take the five out of the house they sheltered in. Four are killed. Felipe Cazals directs. Salvador Sánchez, Ernesto Gómez Cruz and Enrique Lucero are in the cast. It is a Mexican production. The ground is real: the San Miguel Canoa massacre took place on 14 September 1968 and the priest Enrique Meza Pérez incited the crowd. The film won the Silver Bear at the 1976 Berlin Film Festival. It was the first Mexican production to take on the events of 1968; it opened only eight years after them, and the Tlatelolco massacre had happened in the same period. Its form imitates documentary; a villager looks at the camera and describes the place, and the event is set inside that account. The narrative does not make heroes of the dead; the cause is misunderstanding and a fear built in advance. The film does not present the priest as the sole culprit; the state, the army and the press are inside the narrative too. Its limit is the watching; the violence is held long and the narrative gives relief nowhere. Who it is for: viewers who like Mexican cinema and political production. Who it is not for: it is hard, bleak, and the ending calls nobody to account.