Made after the brutal Tlatelolco student repression of 1968, The Change embodies sixties political cinema as much as any film by Godard, Rocha, or Nemeç. Two young men, an artist and a photographer, decide to “drop out” of modern life and relocate to an isolated beach, far away from materialism and hectic urbanity. Their rural idyll, however, is interrupted by the poisons of a nearby factory and the greed of its owners. Fighting fire with fire, or waste with waste, the two men concoct an anarchist scheme that the ruling elite, and the local lawmen, find particularly unamusing. The joke leads to a crackdown, and the crackdown to tragedy. An embittered allegory of Mexico's struggle for justice, The Change is a devastating portrait of post–1968 revolutionaries, and of a mood that turned from hopeful to hopeless.