On Sulawesi, the Toraja people build tongkonan, wooden houses with sweeping boat-shaped roofs that function as far more than shelter. The film follows how these structures anchor family lineage, host death rituals, and mark status within Toraja society, showing carpenters raising the distinctive roof beams and families gathering for ceremonies tied to the house itself. Death among the Toraja is treated as a gradual social transition rather than a single event, and the film shows how funerals, sometimes delayed for months or years while a body remains in the family home, unfold as elaborate communal events centered on the tongkonan. Buffalo sacrifice, carved effigies, and cliffside burial sites appear alongside interviews and observational footage of daily life in the village. Rather than treating the houses as static architecture, the film frames them as living institutions that pass identity, obligation, and memory from one generation to the next, making the built environment inseparable from Toraja beliefs about the dead.