In Mars One, one of the international stand-outs at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, director Gabriel Martins embodies a national anxiety on the precipice of dark times within one working class Brazilian family surviving as best as they can. Tércia, the mother, experiences a random and traumatic event that displaces her sense of ease in the world. Meanwhile, her husband Wellington works a low-end job to support the family, all while pushing his paternal demands on his two children. The eldest, Eunice, finds love in another young woman and wishes to start a new life together, breaking free from her family home. And the youngest just wants to leave the world as he knows it, dreaming of joining the first relocation mission to Mars, one that will never return to Earth.

Though their conflicting desires and the pressures of the world increasingly push them apart, the film finds hard-won optimism in the struggles of an everyday family all while reflecting the times in which they live—and the bonds between them that can’t be broken.