A Magical Substance Flows Into Me weaves through musical traditions of various communities living in and around Jerusalem. Manna took as her starting point German-Jewish ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann’s field recordings of ‘Oriental’ groups in Palestine in the 1930s and his Oriental Music radio series made for the Palestinian Broadcasting Service (1920-1948). In the film we follow Manna as she revisits the communities that Lachmann studied – including Kurdish, Moroccan, and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, members of urban and rural Palestinian communities, Bedouins and Coptic Christians. Over the course of her travels she visits homes, offices, recording studios, and places of worship, replaying Lachmann’s recordings and makes new recordings of her own. Interspersed with these are scenes from her own family home in East Jerusalem.