A sensory, immersive composition takes us on a journey to a place that seems to have stopped in time but remains timeless. A female voice reads a mythological text on the origin of the world and sets the tone for a documentary-meditation on the presence of primeval elements – like water and flora – and their cohabitation with the natives, whose portraits intersperse the film. The stealthy camera follows a boat drifting across the calm waters of a river, as if the latter were the rings of a tree disclosing its history, in a movement that lulls us and drives us to the physical and metaphysical core. Finally, accompanied by an ancestral chant, the etching gives way to a sequence of images (which in turn emerge like a river reducing the field of action to the essential) and moves into a poetic terrain, summoning the imagination of each one. Shot on 16mm and developed manually, this handcrafted film signals Mónica Baptista’s return to Curtas Vila do Conde, where she has presented other films, like “Diário”, in 2011, and “Territórios”, in 2009. (JA)