Synopsis
Starting the decade of the 80’s in Uruguay, in the frontier town of Mosquitos there are two good friends, Esnal and Milo.
They know each other their whole life, they are inseparable, Esnal (50), a mischief and somewhat arrogant, storyteller who lives with his mother. Milo (46), son of Hungarians, father of two daughters, (Beatriz, already in her twenties and Anita, a fifteen year old) and married to Dolores, who spends her days and nights laying in bed with and endless headache.
In Mosquitos “portuñol” is spoken, Mosquitos has its bar, its social club, its radio, its market and its clothing shop, its cemetery, its mail and its river. Mosquitos has its barracks and a Coronel with a lot of secrets and a portrait of his dead father in law who dictates the rules of marcial law.
The town is no stranger to a dictatorial process, that suffocates the air in the whole country and that can detain and disappear to every detractor. This are hard days.
Like two kids looking for adventure, Esnal and Milo, mock the Coronel, vandalizing his most treasured possession, and use the radio to spread a supposedly anonymous message: “It’s time for freedom”. This little act of resistance against arbitrariness does not go as well as it was expected and Milo is detained and disappears without a trace.
The daughters, Beatriz and Anita, Start a search that will bring the oldest to Montevideo and that will delve the youngest in melancholy and persecution from the town folk who are undecided when identifying good from evil. Esnal, guilty for being part of the adventure with his friend and not share the same destiny, imposes himself to a confinement in his room, in the middle of darkness and a nightmare that resembles a lot to delirium.
The ostracism of Esnal will break once the daughters take the resolution of continuing the search for their father in Mosquitos, and meanwhile keeping their heads held up. The death of Esnal’s mother and the flight of Dolores in the middle of an endless summer will leave the girls and friend more than alone, but also free to plan the next steps without renouncing the search for their best friend and father.
Esnal has an idea, maybe it’s time for Mosquitos to listen to a new story, a story in capital letters (UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF HUMANITY) that tells the tale of great men, told by a man with a mission that honors his mischief and vocation for storytelling. An expressive and brave fable that is told through games of light and shadows, and several characters that dare incarnate this epic. A fiction within a fiction, a small battle that is capable of twisting history forever, changing forever a community and the history of one family.