While her mom works long hours as a nurse, ten-year-old Gloria must spend her summer vacation in the hospital. Her slow days chatting with her mother’s elderly patients take a turn for the better when Sofia arrives with her grandmother, a spiritual healer suffering from dementia. The family’s need for a new caretaker offers Gloria and her mother the opportunity to spend summer in the Brazilian countryside, and the two young girls form a bond that exemplifies the simple bliss of childhood friendship.

Director Rafaela Camelo weaves spiritual realism into The Nature of Invisible Things that captures both the magic naiveté of youth and a child’s first understanding of death.