In a dusty, ramshackle town lives A'ida. Her insurgent lover Xavier has been imprisoned. Resolute, sensuous and tender, A'ida s letters to the man she loves tell of daily events in the town, and of its motley collection of inhabitants whose lives flow through hers. But the area is under threat, and as a faceless power inexorably encroaches from outside, so the smallest details and acts of humanity an intimate dance, a shared meal assume for A'ida a life-affirming significance, acts of resistance against the forces that might otherwise extinguish them.