Juliana Rojas juxtaposes two narratives and gives two movements a structuring role: the journey from the country to the city, and the journey back. The film uses settings to expose the effects of neo-colonial mechanisms, playing with established genre conventions to comment on them. The film title is split by a semicolon, separating »city« (Cidade) and »field« (Campo), while the transition between the two stories unfolds in a long cross-fade, thus establishing a connection between the two.
In the first part of the film, Joana loses her home after a dam disaster and moves to the city to live with her sister. The apartment’s terrace has space for pots containing edible plants – a miniature field in an urban landscape. The organisation of work within the gig economy becomes central, emphasising themes of solidarity and friendship. In the second part, the queer couple Flavia and Mara move to the farm left by Flavia’s late father. A neighbour tells them the region is dominated by soy monoculture, making their independent corn and livestock farm an anomaly in an exploitative system controlled by global corporations. Field work proves arduous. In the solitude of the farm, voices, sounds and images evoke the presence of the deceased, the missing and also something unsettling, making life there almost unbearable. Rojas’ film intertwines the rural and the urban through political reflections on labour and living conditions, while continually exploring the role of the media as intermediaries – manifested through cell phones, radios, shadows, noises, sketches and illuminated windows.