Antonio Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s final film, Rosa de Areia, is their most unclassifiable endeavor. The film is a work of sensuous abstraction performed in the open air of Tras-os-Montes, the remote region in Portugal’s Northeast which was a site of lifelong inspiration for the duo. In a series of ritualistic, highly elaborate sequence shots, as elusive and exquisite as the “desert rose” of the film’s title, Reis and Cordeiro spin a cosmic tale of nature and the human condition, drawing on a diverse range of texts ranging from Michel de Montaigne to Carl Sagan. In Cordeiro’s words, “Rosa de Areia is a film for those who can see and listen as if for the first time; as if it was the first film that came from the earth and spoke about it.”