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.

Dina (Maria Santiago) is a teenager brought up by her grandmother, employed as a housekeeper for a fairly well-off family. Since Dina only has her grandmother, she spends her time fantasizing about her life and reading comic-book love stories -- activities that do nothing to improve her dim perspective of reality. Due to these handicaps and her own inexperience, she gets involved with Django (Luis Lucas), a shady character who decides to use her as bait to attract men and then rob them. One day when both are in a taxi with robbery in mind, the driver gets suspicious so Django shoots him, and so does Dina. She escapes and runs away -- though it seems like she has learned too little too late. This story unfolds against a time of upheaval in Portugal (mid-1970s) when the military government is formulating a constitution and social changes are happening everywhere.

A story about doomed love between two people from different worlds and the impact in their lives. Based on the novel of the same name by Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco.

An impossible love. Two young people in love. Vera and John can't find a space nor time, nor identity in this life that can solve this love. Apparently everything is beneficial to them, their families, friends and the land where they live. The issue is time. The time they don't actually have (studies, families, distant houses) and the time of their own life - being so young they are subject to what that life brought upon them, that's when the "story" of the film begins, therefore linked to a life that until then was not chosen by them. This is one reason, which leads to a runaway process. Escape in the possible return to this world.