This documentary is a profoundly intimate tale of the unity and conflict between humankind and the ocean. Hortensia Pérez Rocha stars as herself-a Mexican woman on both an individual journey borne from her own requirement for absolution and on behalf of a community who gracefully endorse her as their emissary. She is not an actress, and therefore she did not "perform," but she is so free with her self in front of a camera that she puts the word authentic to bed-a joy to watch. She describes, solemn in her native Spanish, the events that brought her to this juncture, the process she is undertaking, and the decision to take the audience with her on this sea voyage. An aging prostitute who has become an icon for her small fishing village, she is venerated by reflecting, in both her face and the mirror in the memory box she created, the beauty of naked emotion in the honest faces of her people, whom she encounters in a long series as she fills that box with tokens of grief and love, intending to offer it as sacrifice and gift to the ocean. She is transformed during this pilgrimage, seeking redemption, goddess-like, as memory and need have become one. There is a compelling sequence in which she takes a shower on board, and we witness the soapy water running in seductive rivulets down her bare skin, echoing the waves caressing the shore and the depths which eventually envelop her box as it sinks out of sight, a tribute to lost friends and the culmination of the heartbreaking yet uplifting expedition. Not to be missed.
