Somewhere in an unspecified time, Patrick Mendes presents an initiation ritual in a community at the ends of the earth. Crossing Portuguese cinema references – a mix of António de Macedo’s fantastic imagery with a bit of António Reis’s and Margarida Cordeiro’s timeless ethnography – “The Land of no Return” attempts, through this ritual, to create a dystopic universe, where community seems to prevail over the individual. In a way, the filmmaker returns to a space that questions the forms of human experience, as he already had in “Sleepwalkers”, shown at Curtas Vila do Conde’s 2014 edition. (DR)