We Shall not be Moved 2024

The film opens with archival footage from the documentary El Grito, framing the 1968 Mexican student movement and the harsh crackdown that culminated in the Tlatelolco massacre.

Socorro, Luisa Huertas, a lawyer in her sixties, has spent decades trying to identify the soldier responsible for the murder of her brother Coque, Alessio Valentini on October 2, 1968. Living in quiet isolation in a Tlatelolco apartment with her sister Esperanza, she navigates strained ties with Esperanza and her son Jorge, Pedro Hernández who bears the weight of her unresolved trauma. She shares a relatively warmer connection with Jorge’s wife, Lucía, Agustina Quinci. On what would have been Coque’s seventy-fifth birthday, Socorro receives a long-lost package that names the soldier visible in the final photograph of her brother before his death: Juan Agúndez.

Determined to exact revenge, Socorro tracks down Agúndez with the help of the building’s porter, Siddartha, Andrés Gutierrez. To push her plan forward, she blackmails a former superior, now a magistrate in Mexico City, to obtain the contact information for a hitman. As Socorro’s health falters—she suffers from partial deafness and recurrent fainting spells—she mortgages her apartment and arranges Agúndez’s kidnapping. Meanwhile, Lucía, who is pregnant and unsure of her future because of Jorge’s instability, leaves him and returns to Argentina without revealing her pregnancy.

When the plan unravels, Socorro confronts the kidnapped man herself but collapses mid-encounter. She wakes in a hospital and learns that he was the one who brought her there. The two share a taxi, during which he presents his version of events. He denies being the soldier in the photograph, yet he concedes to having participated in the massacre under orders from a superior officer, and even offers her a gun to kill him. Socorro refuses, insisting that true justice would have meant imprisonment for him.

The movie closes with Socorro returning home and reconciling with Esperanza. As they reflect on Coque’s death and the events of 1968, Socorro burns the photograph of her brother while singing the rallying refrain, > No nos moverán.