Paulina lives and works in a small and very isolated hotel on the border, somewhere in the north, with her colleague Nadia. Together, they occupy their time with a series of daily rituals, sometimes merely childish, others choreographed and scored with cinematic skills and references, while dreaming of a better life in an exotic and distant paradise. However, a guest decides to spend more than one night at the hotel, something quite unusual, perhaps a unique opportunity for Paulina to cross the border. Produced and directed as a film school graduating project at Moscow’s Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), “Rio” is a debut movie that plays with the border metaphor, at the same time geographic and of transition to adulthood, a suitable ground for dreams of a different life and its eventual fulfillment. (MM)