The wind whips across the Dalmatian mountains sometime around the turn of the century. A mysterious figure emerges from the darkness. Teresa is a stranger and yet, at the same time, part of the family she is searching for. She has travelled from Chile to the homeland of her late husband, Marco, to lay his remains to rest there. In a valley, she meets his sister, the shepherdess Milena, and together they set off into the mountains to inform Marco’s family of his death. A fragile bond develops between the two women, sustained by glances, gestures, shared labour and an unbiased closeness from which a language of their own gradually emerges. What follows is a Croatian, feminist odyssey through the pre-modern Dalmatian hinterland, where a stranger returns home to hold up a mirror to society.

Jana Plećaš’s cinematography is stunning; the mountains are the true protagonists. They seem to exert a psychological force: wind, rock and darkness shape the bodies and souls of those who must endure their vastness. A deliberately anachronistic electronic score detaches the action from its historical context and creates a modern, unsettling tension. With austere form and steadfast calm, Hana Jušić tells a story of female solidarity that is timeless.