Amid stifling heat and pervasive drought, Isabel, a 17-year-old Ilokana from the rural north, works at a posh country club outside Manila, lining up golf balls for powerful men to drive into the verdant horizon. New to the job, she wanders the immaculate grounds sampling its luxuries as members, among them an industrialist and his expatriate niece, the club president and his pampered wife, and a slew of Chinese tourists, engage in a complex dance with the doting and subservient staff. But something is rotting beneath the pristine fairways, as Isabel discovers when she tries to return a mislaid golf club to its patriarchal director, Dr. Palanca.

The deeper she journeys into its most exclusive corners, the closer she gets to the violent truths of the club, her native Philippines, and her own past. Rafael Manuel expands his own Silver Bear-winning short into a study of structural violence, where almost nothing violent is shown. He lets the frame lose width and gain verticality, with members high in the shot and workers looking up from below and raises the crack of a club striking a ball until it sounds like gunfire. Isabel is Ilokana, from the region the Marcos family comes from, and her awakening is also an act of remembering. Golf rewards inaction. So, the film suggests, does a country.