A diver goes into oxygen decompression therapy after experiencing a deep-sea earthquake. The hyperbaric session sends him into a state of reverie, connecting him to his counterpart lookalike in the other part of the world.

After a deep-sea earthquake, a diver undergoes oxygen decompression therapy on Catalina Island, California. As pressure rises in the hyperbaric chamber, his consciousness blurs, and he drifts into a reverie that takes him across the world, connecting him to Ernest, his uncanny double wandering the Vjosa-Narta lagoon in Albania.

There, Ernest volunteers at a conservation camp, working side by side with in-house ornithologists seeking to restore balance to the wetlands’ fragile ecosystem. The haunting cry of a displaced Curlew keeps him awake each night. His search for the bird’s meaning leads him upstream toward the ruins of the Tepelena internment camp, where his grandfather’s first family perished. Ernest encounters locals who reveal a sensory rapport they maintain with the environment that preserves culture and resists forms of erasure.

Their ways awaken Ernest’s own senses in the presence of the wild river’s energy, which draws him deeper into a reflective state as he wanders the enchanting landscape marked by both historical and ecological violence.
As the diver sinks into reverie, Ernest drifts into a trance beside the Vjosa, where river and memory merge into a moment of embodied release that culminates in a refreshing inner freedom. These parallel worlds, both shaped in different ways by the elemental force of water, intertwine through these visions, revealing how the rhythms of the nonhuman world affect human lives.