It wouldn’t be quite right to call Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures a road movie, since every place the characters travel to seems exactly the same as the last.

The debut feature from Brazilian director Marcelo Gomes, Cinema opens with Johann (Peter Ketnath), a young German man travelling around rural Brazil in 1942. He should, obviously, be back home in Europe, fighting on the losing side of World War II, but instead he’s run off to the desolate silence and blast-furnace heat of the Brazilian countryside (vividly captured by the bleached-out phototography and muted colour palette of cinematographer Mauro Pinheiro), where the war, and Germany for that matter, may as well not exist–except via occasional staticky updates on the fighting Johann catches through the radio in his truck.

Johann drives around from town to town, all of them stricken by poverty, drought, and isolation, selling the then-new wonder drug Aspirin to the local rubes, who incredulously watch the filmstrip advertisements he lugs around with him. (None of them, you get the sense, has ever seen film before. One man doesn’t want to buy any Aspirin, but he does want to watch the filmstrip again.)

Along the way Johann meets Ranulpho (João Miguel), and offers him a job as his assistant. So the two travel together, slowly unfolding one another’s lives and histories in this most unlikely of places, until finally the war comes knocking, despite Johann’s best efforts to keep it at bay.

And that’s it. We come in on Johann in the middle of his story, and an hour and a half later we drop out again (just as he’s has made a major personal decision that, paradoxically, resolves nothing).

This is a highly philosophical film, but the characters aren’t sitting around bullshitting each other. The immersive atmosphere and easy-going pace aren’t boring but entrancing, once you fall into the film’s rhythm, which captures, in a way a busier film couldn’t, Johann’s dilemma–whether to go home and fight, or to run deeper into the wilderness, away from history and politics.

The friendship between Johann and Ranulpho is truthful and believable: two men, not only of different origins and histories but of hugely divergent personalities and attitudes (Johann enjoys the life of the shiftless wanderer, Ranulpho longs for the big city of Rio to escape the stifling backwater he was born into) become friends the way any of us become friends: by spending time with one another, by conversing, by just being in the same places at the same times. No one ever comes out and says so, but their friendship serves as a testament to the artificiality of borders and nationality, especially as Brazil enters the war against Germany. (It’s a good thing too that no one says anything so explicit. It’s hard to imagine such a bald statement having the same power as the inevitable conclusion the audience has got to infer on their own.) A scene towards the end in which the two of them pretend to meet each other on the battlefield and engage in mock conflict, Ranulpho making fun of Johann for not knowing how to play fight properly, makes explicit the film’s humanistic concerns without getting over the top and preachy about it.

The filmmakers’ poverty of means turns out to be not much of a hindrance at all, given the poverty and simplicity of the landscape they depict.

This film is one of those little treasures that fall into your lap every now and again. Not perfect, but unique, and not something you’re likely to stumble across again.