Campos’ determination to chronicle the local traditions of the rural village of Vilharingo das Furnas was inspired by its impending doom and displacement in the face of a newly constructed hydroelectric dam that required the entire environs to be flooded and abandoned. Made during the last weeks and months before the eponymous village was swept away, the film is a moving expression of Campos’ faith in cinema as a means to give voice and dignity to the people while also making a politically charged counterargument to dominant ideologies, here the push to create a new industrialized infrastructure that would modernize Portugal’s agricultural heartland but also threaten its cultural identity.