Freely based on Gide ('Paludes') and Hawthorne ('Wakefield'), this is a film about a writer who never wrote anything and who blows at nightfall the breath of frost. The poem by Carlos Queiroz to which the above sentences belong is not cited in 'O som da Terra a Tremer', but the atmosphere is that, between written letters never received. Fiction within fiction, stories within stories, like those Chinese boxes in which there is always one inside another. Or the two margins of the same river, always being lateral.

Two simple, unassuming, apolitical men have their lives changed forever when they find themselves hunted by agents of the ruling dictatorship.

One night Jorge will meet with a Japanese industrialist, who will allow him to abandon his teaching position and resume his chemical work. However, when he gets home he finds a person there.

Drawing on a wide mosaic of texts from figures like Montaigne and Kafka, literary and philosophical fragments are used to illustrate and reflect on the human condition. It is a tribute to the landscape and the people who inhabit the Trás-os-Montes region of Portugal, portraying the region not just as a physical space, but as a place where imagination and reality intertwine.