During the rainy Christmas season, a troupe of five actors who are college students lose their way in the mountains of Hidalgo when they try to take a short cut. With their van in need of repairs, they are stranded in a village where a local boss, Don Elias, pays peasants to log the forest illegally. The five collegians have little sensitivity to village ways and are shocked to be treated as foreigners in their own country. When two of them witness assaults on the town's priest and on a harmless simpleton, and when Don Elias frames the troupe for murder, their cries of innocence fall on deaf ears. Vigilantes call for their deaths and give chase. Will anyone help them?