Anay and Sura kneel forehead to forehead in golden swamp light, beside the title Slow Way

Slow Way

A woman whose hands are failing. A mother who has refused, for fifty years, to teach the one thing that could save them.

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Runtime
Eight minutes
Setting
Lati, the swamp region
Time period
150 years before the Onset series
Language
Lati and common tongue

Synopsis

The fast way takes. The slow way asks.

Anay extracts sap from vines for a living. The sap is the only medicine that helps her husband's stiff hands, and her own hands are beginning to fail the same way.

Her mother knows a way to draw a purer, more potent version of the medicine. But her morals and her stubbornness make her reluctant to give the method to her daughter and her tribe.

A standalone prequel story, set 150 years before the events of the Onset series.

Turuan nyo po sakin ang Dahan. Teach me the slow way.

Lati, the old tongue

The characters

Four people. One vine.

Anay, seated, scarred forearms resting on her knees, hands clasped

Anay

Fifty-two

The fastest extractor on the vine floor. Her name sits at the top of the tally board, and her hands are beginning to fail.

Ishem, a kind-faced middle-aged man in a brown work shirt

Ishem

Fifty-four · Anay's husband

His hands went first. He jokes about it so that she does not have to.

Sura, hands folded, the petrified vine pendant at her throat

Sura

Seventy-five · Anay's mother

The last keeper of the slow way, and of her reasons for keeping it.

Emet in a pressed pale collarless shirt, pen poised over his leather notebook

Emet

The floor manager

A true believer in what the floor ships. The only pressed shirt in the building.

The world of the film

One swamp. Two houses.

A great vine wrapped around a tree beside a woven hut, a braided collar at its base
The old vine behind Sura's house. The collar at its base has been mended for fifty-five years.
Sura's house: walls of clay pots with painted labels, herbs drying from the roof
Sura's house. A lifetime of the old way, in clay pots with hand-painted labels.
A one-room woven house at night, a lamp on the table, bottles on a shelf
Anay and Ishem's home. One room, one lamp, and a shelf of grey medicine.

The world

Three hundred years ago, the world woke up.

Slow Way is a small story from a very large one. The swamp Anay works is called Lati, and the chorus that answers Sura's hands is called the Mother there. Long after this story ends, the Mother will choose a voice of her own. So will something deep under the ground.

Enter the world of Onset
A film by

Sasha Samoilov and Dina Klarisse

From the world of

Onset Universe

Contact

[email protected]