“I look at you and I see your gaze devouring the world, but I have no idea what world is being devoured.” Through the form of a personal yet distant essay film, WEEKS OF SAND, MONTHS OF ASH, YEARS OF DUST introduces Macao, a former Portuguese colony handed over back to China in 1999. Having partly grown up in Macao, the filmmaker Rita Macedo revisits the learned history of this territory from a portuguese perspective, addressing post-imperial forms of disavowed political affect alongside the progressing dementia of her own mother. Carefully positioning personal loss next to reflections on colonial narratives, the film ponders questions of looking back into a troubled past from the instability of a presently self-erasing memory.