Every night, Abdelnasser, a retired Qatari pilot in his fifties, dreams that he is drowning while a woman from a distant past tries to hand him a letter that never arrives. Far away in Casablanca, Hayat, a young art teacher, is haunted by a vision of herself embracing a tree in a place she has never seen. Neither knows the other exists. But when Hayat discovers letters among her late mother’s belongings that point to a father she never knew, and Abdelnasser can no longer ignore the messages of his memory, both are set on a path toward a truth neither can name, and toward a buried secret that only art can bring to light.

Moving between Morocco and Qatar, and between the present day and the early 1990s, Muhammed Deniz’s film traces a love story cut short by wars, borders and bad timing, and asks what the past still demands of us. Here the past is not a memory summoned out of nostalgia, but a living trace that lingers in the body, in silence and in the places we thought we had left behind. Woven from glances and silences, missed moments and deferred encounters, it is a mystery and a romance about the quiet ways fate draws two lives back together.