On a remote estate in colonial Brazil, a middle-aged slaveholder of waning fortunes weds his 12-year-old niece after childbirth claims his first wife and only progeny. Vazante’s story is pulled from the director’s own family lore and depicts the moral void formed when humans are treated as chattel. Masterfully lit by sunlight and firelight, the silvery black-and-white photography evokes an era long past but whose tendrils still coil into modern life. Hardly anyone speaks or needs to, their stories written into the textures that surround them. The camera lingers over bare feet and horse hooves slogging through mud, the craggy outcroppings that once promised riches, the smooth long boards of the manor’s hallways, the coarse bricks of slave quarters, the vein-rippled skin of slave hands, the milk-white specter of the child-bride. The title itself (“ebbing”) evokes lives emptied by an unseen yet pervasive violence, leaving hollows where compassionate impulses should be until only one remains, refusing extinction.