A nine-year-old walks across the world because his mother stopped writing. That is the entire premise, and it breaks you because it's true, the desperation of a kid with nothing but letters and memory, trying to close a gap that an ocean made. The film never punches down at poverty or uses Marco's journey as spectacle. It watches a child refuse to accept that distance is permanent, and that refusal costs him everything but never costs him his reason for going.

Nine-year-old Marco lives in 19th-century Genoa with his father, a doctor who tends to the poor. His mother Anna has gone to Argentina for work to escape heavy taxes and a deep economic depression, but her letters suddenly stop arriving. Worried about her, Marco makes a bold decision: he will travel to Argentina alone to find her. What begins as an act of childhood devotion becomes a long, grueling journey of more than 10,000 miles, across the Atlantic and over the Andes. Along the way he leans on courage, friendship and his longing to see his mother again, and he grows up as the road stretches on. This adventure drama film is a coming-of-age story about the pull of family and the ache of separation.