The two dwarves in Rui Nunes’s A Boca na Cinza and the two trolls of Ali Abbasi’s film On the Border have in common the experience of the threshold between the human and the non-human: they are bodies in excess, tied to the weight of their physicality, the reason for their social exclusion. On the other hand, both the book and the film work their languages ??in a style that exacerbates their material potentialities, as if writing and image were endowed with a body. From the collision between these two bodies we aim to reflect on the strangeness of the human being in the face of himself.