Halfway into the film the narrator comments how, after 400 years of Portuguese rule, there was no one able to speak Portuguese in Macau. Yet weirdly, the crux to his comment seemed to be embedded within his narration and direction itself. Not only were the depictions of local life in Macau highly stereotypical, but any native speaker of the Cantonese language would cringe at how unnatural the dialogues are. They are not just inaccurate, they are what you get when you throw English phrases into Google translate and run it through 2 translations and pronouncing them verbatim.

On a less technical note, I found the audio-visual choices to be awkward. At times, what appeared to be the narrator's personal monologue was paired with shots where the unseen protagonist would not have been able to witness. Part of this might come down to the directors' plans to flirt with the noir genre, but in effect this throws the intimacy of the monologue in doubt, as the audience simply cannot decide whether to take the film as a personal monologue or a thriller seen from a divine perspective. As a result, even the narrator's recounting of his childhood days and old family photos turned out to be emotionless and flat. One can't help but wonder how, having spent so much time in Macau, the director still fell pray to such noticeable cultural stereotyping and linguistic negligence.

This movie deserves to fail based solely on the Storyline description. Who wrote that garbage?

"Two filmmakers leave to Macao in an adventure of discovery of a city-labyrinth, multicultural and mysterious, where the memories of the childhood - featured memories by the lived reality in Macao - have a dialog with the memories of the East built by the codes of the cinema and the literature - memories lived on a featured reality-, creating a testimony which tries to raise the veil on the past and the present time."

That's one whole sentence. Is this rubbish all we have to base our decision on??

This gives almost no insight into the basic premise of the story. Instead it goes out of its way to obfuscate and confuse with a convoluted mishmash of poorly written babble.