The story of Sharon Yitzhaki varies depending what source you look at. The description for her memoir 10 Kilos of Cocaine — upon which the new film by Israeli director Doron Eran is based — relates that she went to Bolivia with “a partner she barely knew,” and ended up “framed” for smuggling cocaine. Publicity material for the film details that Sharon had “ten kilos of cocaine strapped to her body” when she was apprehended at the La Paz airport in Bolivia. The film itself portrays Sharon’s arrest as that of an innocent bystander who has, at some point, found herself sharing a hotel room with a man called Roni… a man with drugs stashed in his luggage. When the police raid the room, they claim that Roni’s luggage, and his contraband, belong to Sharon, place her under arrest, and try to build a case against her that’s founded as much on resentment against American meddling in their country as the suspicion that Sharon’s claims of innocence are hollow. A beautiful blonde, and painted as an American despite her Israeli upbringing, Sharon finds that she’s a media sensation outside the prison even as she learns to become a force to reckon with inside it.

Whatever the real-life chain of events might have been that landed Yitzhaki in a dystopian women’s prison in Bolivia, the movie follows the beats of a classic “locked up for a crime she did not commit” story, though one with some brutally rough edges that do not spare the heroine (Sharon is played by Israeli actor Daniella Kertesz). The prison is a small town in its own right, with a marketplace, various criminal factions, and overseers who literally turn their backs to the drug dealing, extortion, violence, and murder taking place in the prison. Everyone from the warden to a cartel chief has vested interests in keeping the prison its own nexus of wrongdoing, despite the fact that children born there grown up in the prison next to their incarcerated mothers… some of whom do not survive.

Sharon takes in one such orphan, Lena (Stefany Merida), and builds a family life together with her and a transgender woman named Terry (trans actress Lioz Levy), as well as with the world-weary, rabbit-hugging Diane (Maya Eshet). The cost of keeping herself and her chosen family is steep: Sharon ends up working with the very drug cartel she’s accused of having smuggled for. In order to secure her place in the prison’s hermetic society, she adopts some the ruthless rules she has suffered under herself. At the same time, Sharon pushes back against the forces determined to keep her imprisoned, including a crusading attorney general and a D.E.A. agent looking to make her an informant within the cartel’s ranks. She works for years to secure her own release, walking a tightrope between freedom and annihilation, but the specter of addiction to her own wares threatens to plunge her, Terry, and Lena into an abyss from which there can be no redemption.

The film pulls few punches in its examination of how corrupt systems do more harm than good and twist themselves into engines of evil even as they trumpet claims of righteousness. No one emerges unscathed; justice and vengeance become indistinguishable; dainty distinctions around morality fall away in the face of sheer survival. Still, Daniella Kertesz finds a perfect balance point between Sharon’s toughness and her desperation and allows her to be as bad as she needs to be while keeping hold of the viewers’ sympathies. Director Doron Eran shows us a prison community that is vicious but also tight knit, with tragedy and joy existing side by side.

10 Kilos is in limited release. It will be released on streaming services Sept. 29.