The aftermath of an earthquake. In the town of Juchitán de Zaragoza a woman scrambles through the ruins of a house for a loved one. She searches frantically through the rubble, and then stops. She has found something. Someone. With her bare hands, she claws at the rubble, the masonry and the dust to uncover a body. A face. At first it appears to be the face of a man, then as she clears more of the dust, we see that it’s the face of a woman, her ears weighed down by large gold earrings, a dust encrusted garland in her hair. It is the face of Delirio, and she is dead.

We see that same face, alive and well, a few weeks earlier. She is dressed in a traditional Zapotec dress, her hair collected in that garland of flowers, her face made up. She sits at a dressing table and begins removing her make up. The more make up she takes off, the more she reveals masculine features, her jawbone, her nose, her mouth. Slowly, Delirio reveals herself to us as a man in middle age. Except that she is not a man, and neither is she a woman. She is a muxe. Arranged around the dressing table mirror are a series of postcards of a foreign country. She looks away from her own reflection to one of those cards. and picks one up. On the front of the postcard is an image of a forest landscape: pine trees, lakes, blue skies. Finland. On the back are words of longing from a long lost love. She loses herself in that landscape so that it comes to life, the wind blowing through the tops of those conifers, which stretch as far as the eye can see.

Another day and another delivery of a postcard, all the way from Finland. This latest one is dropped off by her neighbour and friend, Amaranta, a thirty year old Muxe. Amaranta lives with her father, Héctor, who is old and deaf but never lets an opportunity go by without insulting Amaranta, expressing his shame at what his son has become. Whilst Delirio seeks refuge in the Finnish landscapes on the postcards, Amaranta seeks refuge in the company of men who she meets in the local cantina, often they are married, often they are drunk, always they promise her the world and deliver little more than a night of drunken passion.

Both Delirio and Amaranta make traditional Zapotec clothes. The hand stitched, embroidered and colourful dresses and blouses that they both wear. Amaranta sits at her clothes stall in the local market, stitching one of those very blouses. She looks up from her embroidery to see a woman in her 20s, MARTA, a Western tourist who is taking a great interest in the clothes on offer. Amaranta invites her to try on one of those traditional, embroidered blouses. She takes her to a small makeshift dressing room and a few moments later comes out wearing it. She looks at herself in the mirror and clearly likes what she sees. She takes a photo of herself and is back in the dressing room trying another blouse. She takes another photo. Then tries another outfit, and takes another photo, and another, until Amaranta becomes suspicious of her intentions. She quizzes Marta on what she is up to, but Marta is evasive, making it patently clear that she has no intention of buying anything. As the mood sours between them, a passerby makes an attempt to steal Marta’s mobile phone from her handbag. Amaranta catches the thief red handed, takes the phone back and gives it back to Marta. What was looking to be an awkward meeting becomes the beginning of a beautiful friendship between the Muxe and the Western tourist.

In another house, in another part of town a twelve year old boy by the name of Mariano stands before the mirror in his bedroom. He pulls back his hair, collects it in a garland and imagines himself as a Muxe. Through the open door, his mother SARA watches him, worried at what her boy is clearly becoming. When Mariano is not at school, he visits his new friend Delirio, bombarding her with questions about her embroidery, about how she became a Muxe and about those strange postcards she receives from that foreign land. When his mother sees him leaving Delirio’s house one day, she forbids him from ever visiting her again. She is terrified that he will follow in Delirio’s footsteps and become a muxe. But there is something his mother is hiding, that makes her react in the way that she does. Something about her husband, Mariano’s father, about what he became and why he left her, and as Mariano gets older he begins to ask his mother questions too.

As Delirio loses herself in the postcards from her long lost lover, bringing those beautiful forest landscapes to life, she begins to wonder whether these postcards have been sent not from Finland but from somewhere closer to home, from someone she knows. It could be an admirer, or it could be someone trying to cushion her from the harsh reality of a past heartbreak.

Marta and Amaranta bond more every day as Marta gets a crash course from Amaranta in what it is to be a Muxe in this town, the highs the lows, the difficulty of making ends met from their clothes making and the bitter reality of what love means for a Muxe. Marta is a shoulder to cry on, but Amaranta’s suspicions about Marta and what she is doing there in the first place, grow. Is she a true friend or just another foreigner come to steal their designs and livelihoods to mass produce them for a western market?

We accompany Maraiano on his painful journey as he is bullied at school, harassed by his mother, asking questions for which he receives no answers. Despite his mother’s warnings, he continues to seek solace in the company of Delirio, who teaches him to accept himself, as he slowly blossoms into a Muxe.

Unbeknownst to them, disaster is just around the corner. Only Delirio has an inkling of what is to come. She feels it in the air, in the restlessness of the caged birds that she keeps and that she will set free, and in the signs and omens that she is tuned into. But when disaster strikes there will be no hiding from its force, not in the buildings, not in the streets, and not even in the breathtaking forest landscapes to which Delirio escapes on a daily basis, and which to her have become more real than life itself.