Virginio and Sisa, played with beautiful naturalness by non-professional actors, are an ageing couple living in remotest rural Bolivia, in a quiet, gorgeously perceptive debut that brought writer-director Alejandro Loayza Grisi the World Dramatic prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
Faced with challenges specific to them that can also be read as an allegory for wider environmental and social challenges, the increasingly isolated couple must face down an existential threat to the simple way of life they want desperately to maintain, despite most of their tiny community giving up on it. Grisi's background in photography reveals itself in the film's striking, finely tuned, occasionally magical landscapes but it's his sensitivity as a cinematic storyteller, and the compact, taciturn performances of his two remarkable stars, that give this small movie an aching impact that reaches out to a far broader, endangered horizon.