Socorro (Luisa Huertas), with a mop of frazzled grey hair, chain-smokes and drinks to oblivion. She’s an aging civil rights attorney rapidly losing her hearing and with a worsening problem where she suddenly, unceremoniously, blacks out. Her apartment, scattered with an impossibly high number of books, papers and over-filled ashtrays, is home to herself, her wayward, out-of-work journalist son, Jorge (Pedro Hernández) and his Argentinian wife, Lucia (Agustina Quinci). Her dopey assistant, Sidarta (José Alberto Patiño), runs errands for her while wearing a trucker hat with a plague on the crown that spells his name. In this small, cramped corner of Mexico, this patchwork family gets sucked into the vortex of Socorro’s obsession: finding and killing the soldier who murdered her brother, fifty years ago.
We Shall Not Be Moved – which takes its name from the popular labor solidarity anthem popularized in the United States in the 1950s by Black civil rights activists – is a quietly devastating film about the domino effect of unresolved political trauma. Through Socorro, feature debut director Pierre Saint Martin Castellanos draws a fierce parallel between victims of state-sanctioned violence and those that survive it, questioning all along what survival even means when life is ripped away.
In 1968, peaceful student protestors of UNAM and several other universities in Tlatelolco were massacred by the Mexican Armed Forces (exact casualty numbers are disputed, but survivors suggest somewhere between 300 and 400). One of those victims was Socorro’s brother, and for decades, she has pursued justice — or what justice is available to her. “Justice in this country is for the rich or those with power,” she argues, and so she advocates instead for an eye for an eye.
When we meet the scrappy, acerbic lawyer, she has, seemingly, given up the fight to find the murderer. Until one day, when the son of a deceased old colleague in the government shows up at her apartment with a box. Inside, she finds a photograph of her, a photograph of a group of soldiers, and a list of possible perpetrators. One of those names is circled: Juan Agundez. Socorro immediately springs into action by enlisting Sidarta to find Agundez and kill him. “I don’t do that anymore,” he says. No matter. He owes her.
What follows is a bizarre cat and mouse thriller unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, because the chase isn’t so much between Socorro and the object of her revenge but between herself and the fleeting pleasures of vengeance. Castellanos’s film is a portrait of the desperation of finding the culprit in an inherently unjust system when the real target of anger should probably be the system itself.
Meanwhile, Jorge son struggles to find work, but also refuses to accept a job interview his wife has gotten for him. Entirely too devoted to his ailing mother, he sees no problem with giving away his money at the same time that he berates her for pursuing the things he enables. Candiani (Juan Carlos Colombo) calls Socorro from time to time, smoking like a chimney while still strapped to a ventilator. He wants his son to let him die in peace. For a while, Castellanos has a hard time balancing these various storylines and letting them interact organically, but when it happens, the full tapestry comes into place in heartbreaking totality.
With the aid of César Gutiérrez Miranda’s miraculously photographed scenes, Castellanos sharply illuminates how power damages victims both direct and indirect. As Socorro’s son finds difficulty ingratiating himself into the systems that his mother so strongly opposed, he also cannot help but embolden his mother’s dangerous obsession. Candiani seems bound for physical demise in part because of how unhealthily he has attached himself to her cause.
Through these imperfect characters, we see how solidarity can be both a healthy arbiter of progress and a detractor from the here and the now. Is vengeance worth fighting for if it causes those enacting it to lose their own lives? What if the person you’re chasing has no memory of what they’ve done? What does justice look like if its not pursued in the public eye, carried out in places outside traditional channels?
At one point, Socorro convinces Lucia to help her secure some documents by flashing her cleavage. “The things we must do for a little justice,” Lu says. Castellanos makes us wonder if justice is real when it can also degrade those who seek it. And if the government can’t help – offering as little as 200,000 pesos as reparation – then, perhaps, we shouldn’t be surprised when people look for it in shadowy corners. Corners shot in beautiful black and white. Too bad right and wrong isn’t also as binary as the film’s color scheme.