Using a real-life disaster as inspiration, Marité Ugás imparts a captivating fable about a 13-year-old runaway. Trekking along Venezuela's stunning, unblemished coastline, the nameless "kid" (wonderfully played with equal measures of naïveté and deviousness by phenomenal newcomer Iker Fernández) tells contradictory tall tales about the fate that befell his family during the Vargas mudslides (which claimed more than 10,000 lives).
While certainly happy to accept his listeners' charity, it's not their handouts that he's looking for. Through a series of seamlessly incorporated flashbacks (that find the kid living in the astoundingly cinematic ruins of an apartment block), Ugás slowly unveils the true motivations for his quest. Meanwhile, the journey itself reveals that the mudslides weren't just a turning point for the kid. In fact, they affected the course of an entire nation. Just as there's some truth to every lie, there's a wealth of honesty in this entrancing fiction.