A sixty-year-old murders his neighbour in a fight over water, in a village lost somewhere in the interior of Portugal. Methodically, the film follows the bureaucratic and emotional stages of his prison sentence, and his relationship with a nephew. In this depiction of a country undergoing change, João Mário Grilo explores progress and the end of a way of life, destroyed by desertification of the interior and the attraction of a new world (America, where his brother lives; the beauty salon, which the wife of his nephew dreams of opening).