She menage to save from a fire a bunch of pictures and a diary written by hand. Those words and faces becomes the last traces left from the man she one day knew and loved. Crossing mountains and roads, she tries to remake his steps. The places she vists bring people, gestures, memories and histories that slowly become part of her life.

In Luz nos trópicos, Paula Gaitán weaves together a dense fabric of storylines, timelines and settings, intermingled with indigenous cosmologies, travelogues and anthropological literature. Initially, the director follows a young man of indigenous origin. At the beginning, he is standing on the banks of the East River in winter. Soon he is travelling upriver through the Brazilian jungle to a village, where he is greeted like an old friend. In a second storyline, the director accompanies a group of European settlers. They are also travelling upriver, collecting, possessing and searching for a position from which they can survey the forest and the river. Some 150 years separate the two layers; sometimes, a dive into the water dissolves this separation in the space of a second. Later on, the film wanders northwards again and the layers collapse into one another. Between Walden Pond and the Amazon lies just a cut.
Luz nos trópicos is an homage to the abundant greenery of the Amazon region, the woods of New England in winter and the indigenous populations of both Americas. A film that is as free-flowing as a winding river.

2014 film by Ferdinando Vicentini Orgnani

1997 film by Emanuele Crialese