Here’s a beautiful and surprising film, which demonstrates the potential of the animated documentary as a poetic and aesthetic variation of reality. On a theme that shows the countryside desertification, about the submersion of settlements dictated by the ruthless hand of finance that demands more income, this small island appears, a house, not more, and voices that murmur in time and tell us about this liquid thing called memory. And we go on a trip, with an excellent soundtrack, in a delicate and melancholy procession, led by a "careto" (mask) – a typical carnival figure in Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro, which results in a unique setting honoring our rural countryside, now almost extinct. "Drop by Drop" is the first film by Alexandra Ramires (Xá) and Laura Gonçalves as a team (who also produced another animated documentary in a master's degree), a field that proved to be fertile in the experimentation of animated engraving, in the treatment of texture and rhythm and that makes this object so unique. (VV)