Tlayucan

Desperate over his son’s illness, the peasant Eufemio steals a pearl from the image of Santa Lucia in the village church. But tourists passing through photograph the theft, and the man is nearly lynched by his neighbours. The pearl meanwhile disappears: one of the pigs his wife Chabela keeps has swallowed it. What follows is the story of how a small town takes that theft, with the church, the neighbours, the debts and all the things everyone knows and nobody says coming into play at once. Rather than judging the thief, the film judges the town, and that is where its humour comes from. Luis Alcoriza’s hundred and five minute Mexican film was adapted from a novel by Jesus Velazquez, was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign film, and was completed in 1962.