Cypriot filmmaker Tonia Mishiali's second feature, screening at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, traces the connection between Mariama, a Senegalese migrant facing limited opportunity and discrimination, and Stella, an immigration center worker rebuilding her life. The film uses parallel narrative strands that gradually converge, allowing the director to develop her characters' relationship whilst exploring how patriarchal systems marginalise women across different circumstances, motherhood's complexities, and female persistence despite structural disadvantage.

Mishiali drew creative inspiration from her own displacement as an infant when her family fled Cyprus in 1974, combined with her interactions with African asylum seekers whose sustained optimism contrasted sharply with the historical trauma her own family carried. She structured the film to juxtapose two responses to hardship—one characterised by hopefulness despite barriers, the other by bitterness tempered with hope—whilst crafting multidimensional characters and nuanced portrayals of male figures, avoiding reductive polemicism. As a female filmmaker, she situated these narratives within a patriarchal cultural context she observes in her own professional sphere.