Lucas Nascimento

Two travelers inside strange landscapes.

The social project of a teacher faces failure as the pupils' priorities are love affairs and work. Their days are devoted to desire and Brazilian funk, seeking an utopic independence, while reality creeps up on them.

They said there was a sugar cane field outside. And now all memory of the cane spread around.

It's the second wave of the COVID pandemic in Rio de Janeiro. There's no water in Madá's old mansion, a sewing cooperative where sheltered LGBTQI+ young people live and work. Renê, one of the residents, paints the anguish of a mysterious spirit that haunts the shelter through the plumbing. Across town, a loner middle-aged plumber, Ismael, is tormented by the same curse.

Two monster friends decide to follow different directions. Decades after leaving, Naiana is a high school teacher in a small coastal town, where a hotel under renovation emanates a strange presence. Three thousand kilometers away, the devouring night involves Diego.

At a supermarket, Magno watches over boys with backpacks as they go along the corridors. Meanwhile, the night drags on slowly for Bismarck, a cashier.

Teenager Joana feeds her soul with literature and rock. In 1979, when amnesty is granted in Brazil, she's forced to move with her family from Paris back to the country she barely remembers. Back in the city she was born in, and where her father was forcedly disappeared, she recovers pieces of memory from a fragmented childhood in Rio de Janeiro. Not everything is real, not everything is imagination. And as she remembers, Joana must write her own story in the present tense.