Gradiva deals with a man who constructs/creates an idealized image of a woman, seductive but false.

After unearthing an ancient bas-relief sculpture of the gradiva or ‘woman who walks’ a young archaeologist begins to dream of the figure eluding him, while also pursuing a mysterious woman who eludes him in his waking life. Based on the novella by Wilhelm Jensen.

GRADIVA was shot over a period of five summers and weaves a complex set of themes. Based loosely on the Wilhelm Jensen story, "Gradiva," used by Freud in Delusion and Dream to describe the relation of delusion to dream and both to fetishes, GRADIVA is a portrait of a thirteen-to-seventeen-year-old adolescent girl. The word gradiva is Latin, and roughly translates as "one who walks forward most lightly." The film uses several themes, among them, the role of dolls and fetishized objects (especially rocks, bones, sticks, flowers and other natural forms).

An English historian travels to Morocco to work on a study of the painter Delacroix. He hears of a rare series of engravings and embarks on a search for them that takes him through the mysterious streets of the ancient medina. He becomes obsessed with the figure of a beautiful blond woman dressed in white that he sees there. but it appears that she may have died years before.

By combining a journey to the locations for Eisenstein’s unfinished opus Que Viva Mexico! with images of an Indian girl walking, Carasco has created a cinematic topos across multiple historical eras. We see figures walking, marching, in motion, as we set out on the trail of a film, and of the Tarahumara – those who run fast.

The movie shows a smattering of images from the story of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva. The subject is sublimated desire.