A seagull is caught by the black tide of a sinking petrol ship. She manages to fly inland and falls down in a garden by a cat. Moribund, she asks the cat to fulfill three promises: that when she lays her egg he must not eat it; that he must take care of it until it hatches; that he would teach the newborn how to fly.
The film is based on the novel (of the same name) by the Chilean writer Francisco Coloane, and on the chronicles of the Romanian engineer Julius Popper, a nationalized Argentine and one of the principle actors in the genocide of the Selk'nam, one of the indigenous peoples who inhabited the Tierra del Fuego Archipelago.
A group of fishermen decide to initiate their youngest one through a different kind of storytelling - telling of an obese woman who will guide him through his sexuality.
In a country (alluded to be Chile) under dictatorship, a police night raid comes up with a few usual anti-regime suspects. They are sent to a camp in the middle of nowhere. Their friends on the outside start to plan their escape.
Something very common in our days, an adolescent who does not find communication with her mother or stepfather falls into a depression that drags her down paths of difficult return. A film that shows the harshness of loneliness and the wrong search for drugs as a way out of problems.
