15 year old Sam Franks returns home from boarding school to Genoa, a sleepy river town in country Victoria, for the summer holidays. Silvy, a local girl, shares Sam's intelligence, curiousity about the world and a mutual openness to new experiences.Sam and Silvy take off together from the local dance for a ngiht swim in the river when tragedy strikes - an event that will change their lives forever. She has disappeared, presumably beneath the water and is never found.Twenty years later, and Sam is a grown man, teaching psychology at a Melbourne Univerisity. When his father dies Sam escorts the body back to a hometown full of silent ghosts and distant memories. Caught in a massive downpour, he rescues a mysterious woman from the swollen river. At first she has difficulty remembering her accident. But as they wander the town fragments of her memory return and slowly the past manifests itself in the present. "…a beautiful film that might become a classic."