The towns and villages along the Peruvian section of the Amazon can’t be reached by road. If you can’t afford to take the plane, you travel by cargo boat on the river for days. As a means of transport, the boats are part of an important infrastructure: While the steamships of the “rubber barons” used to travel this route during the brutal rubber boom, cargo boats now bring goods to the communities on the edge of the rain forest.
The observations of the Peruvian brothers Álvaro and Diego Sarmiento and the anthropologist Terje Toomistu are focused entirely on the occurrences on the boat: loading and unloading sugar, chickens, onions, lemonade and building material, the crew, the passengers travelling hammock to hammock on deck, and the people waiting on the banks of the river. The camera never glorifies either the landscape or the work; instead it is always in the midst of things, sometimes even in the way. The journey downstream is accompanied by tales of sinking ships, swimming animals and newfound faith. Observed with such reserve, a lot can still be inferred: about the tough jobs of the dockers, the lives of the women and children who come aboard to sell food, about the influence of the “Israelitas” and how important trading by boat is for the indigenous population of the tributaries.

The hippie movement that captivated hundreds of thousands of young people in the West had a profound impact on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Within the Soviet system, a colorful crowd of artists, musicians, freaks, vagabonds and other long-haired drop-outs created their own system, which connected those who believed in peace, love, and freedom for their bodies and souls. More than 40 years later, a group of eccentric hippies from Estonia take a road trip to Moscow where the hippies still gather annually on the 1st of June for celebration that is related to the tragic event in 1971, when thousands of Soviet hippies were arrested by the KGB. The journey through time and dimensions goes deep into the psychedelic underground world in which these people strived for freedom.