Stoic and sturdy, Chavo is a practical woman respectful of traditions, but seemingly too busy with the difficult realities of everyday life to spend much time contemplating the grand mysteries of existence. Returning home from her job in the city to care for her feeble ninety-nine-year-old mother, Chavo is determined to keep her in good health and spirits. She stubbornly plans for her mother's one hundredeth birthday, even as it is clear that the old woman is more than prepared for her last breath. Chavo struggles to understand how her mother is so at peace with dying, while also grappling quietly with the strained relationships she has with her distant husband and two children, who have grown accustomed to her long periods of absence. Highly attuned to the beauty and wonder of the natural world, Mai Morire is a haunting meditation on death as a part of life. Inspired by a woman he met while making his first film, as well as his experience with the passing of his own mother, director Enrique Rivero conjures the magical, nearly pre-Columbian-looking town of Xochimilco through ethereal landscapes, dense layers of sound, and attentively observed rituals of memorial. With an austere style and gentle touch, he plumbs powerful emotion from beneath the film's placid surface, resulting in a poetic evocation of death as a transformative event experienced by the living.