SYNOPSIS

Nina, a woman in her early thirties, makes her long-awaited breakthrough as a director, winning a major film award for her latest documentary. She shares this success with Emil, a close friend and producer of all her films, who is in his early fifties.  Nina seems to have everything she has ever dreamed of yet, to her surprise, success does not bring her the happiness she expected. Nina’s personal life is a complete mess. She lives alone in her minimalist apartment, and her only relationships outside work are one-night stands. One evening, drunk, she gets behind the wheel and crashes the car. She survives, but her injuries prevent her from returning to work to complete her new project, a documentary exploring the contemporary trend of eco-sensuals – people who have sexual relations with trees. To speed up her recovery, Nina travels to the Black Sea for mud therapy. While spending her days in a kitschy hotel and trying every possible treatment, she meets Kostas an elderly, retired salt worker who tells her the story of a miracle performed by a woman, which saved his leg. Intrigued, Nina insists on meeting her and is introduced to Irini, a woman in her mid-50s who is an eccentric cleaner at the Salt Museum. She is a strange salt healer, once a gatherer of fleur de sel, the finest, most delicate, most precious salt in the world. Irini lives with her husband Ivo , a funny and very positive man in his early sixties, in a house that is separated from the village and was once part of a small salt-working community. Irini cares for Ivo, who is seriously ill. They have never been able to have children, despite many attempts. Over the following weeks of treatment, Nina is forced, for the first time, to slow down and look inward. She realises that the real wounds she must confront are not those of her body, but those in her soul – wounds caused by the death of her father, who died young saving little Nina from drowning. Since that time, her mother has never shown any closeness toward her daughter, silently blaming her for the accident. Nina withdraws into herself and finds an outlet in cinema, convinced she is incapable of having a normal family. Years earlier, when Nina became pregnant by the man she loved, she had an abortion without telling him. That decision changed her  life forever. Complications from the procedure left her unable to conceive again. Moved by the life around her, Nina begins documenting this unknown world on her phone. It is a world shaped by love and by the salinity of the lake, which determines the survival of all living things around it. Determined finally to make the film she truly wants, rather than the one expected of her, Nina abandons her ecosensuals project. This creates a rift with Emil but leads her back to the man she loves – the one she thought she had lost.