Simon Jamart

Within the revelry of Rio's Carnival, Ilma writes to her son. How does she sense his presence in the crowd?

Since her father's death, 15-year-old Rosie hasn't spoken a word. But as the weeks passed, her silence, once a refuge, quickly became a poison that won't let her go. Now it's the last day of the harvest, the end of a season. But for Rosie, everything is just beginning.

B., a film-maker and insomniac, decides to rescue his hours of insomnia from the void by filming his quest for sleep. The insomniac asks questions about these different states of consciousness and about the difficulties humans have in synchronising their social rhythms and biological ones.

The wanderings of a retail trader, Jean-Simon, sketch the contours of a microcosmic informal economy in Congolese society. The financial urgency of everyday life is permeated by the political situation in Congo: a larger, more abstract urgency, which the diaspora experiences from a distance. The film finds itself somewhere in between these two imperatives, between here and somewhere else, the past and the present, small money and big money.