In 1968, during the height of Mexico's student uprising and social upheaval, a group of university workers on a hiking trip were assaulted by a hysterical mob in the town of San Miguel Canoa. Five people died. Canoa, constructed as a faux documentary, complete with an onscreen narrator, revisits this tragedy to unveil a reactionary system of clerical abuse, rural poverty, and anti-Communist hysteria. Cazals's narrator takes viewers first into Canoa by day, where erosion has created a town of dirt and stone, and where a possibly corrupt priest exhorts his flock to be vigilant against provocateurs; and then into Canoa by night, where five visiting college employees attract suspicion, anger, and finally death. Made only seven years after the actual event, Canoa is for critic Carl J. Mora “the most powerful and unsettling statement on Mexico's bloody repression of 1968.” Part historical document, part true-life horror film, the terrifying images of mob violence, manipulated anger, and attacked innocents remain as frightening now as they were then.