The Heist

Lecumberri prison in Mexico City. Three drug addicted inmates manage to get a supply inside with the help of one man's mother. When they are found out, all three are shut in the punishment cell known as the apando. The protests that rise against the treatment of the men in there turn into a bloody confrontation. The film is adapted from José Revueltas's short novel of 1969, which he wrote in Lecumberri itself, held there as the supposed intellectual author of the 1968 student movement. He co-wrote the screenplay with José Agustín and died in April 1976, before the film opened. Felipe Cazals softens nothing and takes the prison as itself rather than as a metaphor.