Carlos, un despiadado experto en negociaciones español que trabaja en Bruselas, recibe el encargo de gestionar el secuestro de un alto ejecutivo de una compañía petrolera en un convulso país de África Occidental —con el que mantiene viejos y profundos lazos—, desgarrado por tensiones étnicas y los abusos del gobierno.
The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line is comparable to a crease in the pages of the family album, but also to a crack in the walls of the paternal house. It resembles the open wound created when drilling into a mountain, but also a scar in the collective imaginary of a society, where the idea of salvation finds its tragic destiny in the political struggle. What is at the end of that line? Will old war songs be enough to circumvent that destiny?
Patagonia, Argentina, 1880s. During the Conquest of the Desert, Marguerite, the French wife of Colonel Garay, in charge of protecting a new railway, discovers that a French woman is being held captive by the local natives.
In the Araucanía Region, an area marked by historical relations between Mapuche and non-Mapuche people, the shooting of a police officer results in the death of a young Mapuche man. On the other hand, a community member who has been sentenced to 10 years in prison has been on a hunger strike for over one hundred days. In the background, we have the experience of Aniceto Norin, a Longko who has spent five years in prison for the crime of "Terrorist Threat," whose account allows us to understand his thoughts and the impact of assuming his role and his Mapuche identity.
Laosan, a young family man, spends all his time smoking opium. For his community, lost in the heart of the Laotian jungle, opium farming is the only way to survive. But opium is also the poison that puts men to sleep and kills their desires.
On the border, the line as principle of property and belonging reaches an extreme dimension where it physically defines the sphere of its relations. Those who transgress it reconstruct these imaginary lines on a daily basis, redefining the traditional geography and occupying the non-spaces where others live in a temporary form of existence. These others, the non-citizens, are phantasmtic, exchangeable parts of a flexible market. Made invisible, they are permanently controlled persons. Under the pretext of a greater civilian security, they are kept clear from the public spaces reserved for the citizens with rights and pushed into non-public spaces, which are run by state and military surveillance, multinational operations servicing a European market and non-governmental organisations.
Arya (26), a Javanese man from a dating agency who was in the middle of a matchmaking session, was interrupted by an elder dancing community who were karaoking with loud music. Jojo (23), Arya's coworker, suggests buying a silencer, but they don't have enough cash to buy one. Soon, an old Chinese man, Yongki (65) signs up as a client who is willing to pay extra to find his daughter Leoni (26) a Chinese match, who turns out to be Arya's girlfriend.
Tensions between classes and genres, national and international, popular and formal, color and black and white, figurative and abstract revive the eternal discussion between opposites that the imaginary cronopios and famas represent.