Life is not the most fulfilling for sixteen-year-old Meng: Lounging at home with his grieving father on a daily basis, being excluded from his family’s past, and forced into bullying other kids at school. Everything changes when he is thrown into a life-altering adventure that propels him into an exciting unfamiliar landscape.

Shooting on 16mm film in Mozambique, director Ico Costa explores the textures of human behaviour as he follows young men who wonder what lies beyond their immediate surroundings. In the fragments of conversations captured in the Maputo market, a recording studio and on coconut trees, we find daily routines and tedium lead to chit-chat on desire, money and hope. In the interplay between performance and document, poetry emerges from fleeting everyday moments.

Henrique is a terse Portuguese smallholder who lives out in the hills, far from civilisation. We realise something is wrong in his life when occasional passers-by ask if there is any news about his daughters. The next day, he drives to a nearby village, follows someone and does something terrible. He then flees back to the hills. The almost entirely dialogue-free second half of the film focuses on Henrique as he hides out. We occasionally hear voices, or a helicopter swoops overhead. In the end, he returns to the village. Ico Costa explicitly uses an elliptic narrative structure, to allow viewers to form a man from the clay he puts in front of them. Who is Henrique? Can his deed be understood? Is he telling the truth when he says he didn’t want to hurt anyone? In the meantime, almost incidentally, the stunning beauty of the landscape passes by. Henrique washes himself in the waters of a river – a river called Alva.