After several close calls with death squads, Mario Handler fled Uruguay in 1973 and eventually settled in Venezuela where he lived and continued to make films before returning to Uruguay in recent years. The first film he completed in exile, Dos puertos y un cerro is an essay film about the imbalances of trade. A narrator dispassionately recounts in voice-over a brief summation of Venezuela's situation as a hub port in the establishment of the colonial system in the sixteenth-century.