In the 1930s, in the South of State of Bahia, Brazil, an adventurer with no name or history, who has already been shot seven times, gets involved in the battle for land and cacao plantations. His plan is to take the place of "Colonel" Santana, taking his wife and money. He starts a bloody conflict, in which many simple people and landowners die.
A group of armed soldiers is sent to the Northeast of Brazil in an attempt to stop a famine-struck population from invading and stealing a food deposit in the dry backlands. While the alienation and insanity of people driven to hallucination by their latent hunger is conducted by the predictions of a religious figure, a truck driver observes the situation and remains torn between his friendship with the soldiers and his revolt against the lack of government action in fighting the misery that lingers over the region.
An accident at a construction site, resulting in one death, sets one worker off on a struggle for justice that exposes the mechanisms of exploitation and the class relations of a country that had undergone one decade of fast-paced ‘conservative modernisation’ at the hands of the military. As a sort of sequel to the classic The Guns (1964), following the fate of those characters as they move from enforcers of exploitation to exploited, it offers more than a snapshot of the period: the correspondent time lapses in fiction and reality capture the passage of a chunk of Brazilian history between the two films, and, therefore, also the transformations in cinematographic approaches to the social and political between the two moments. Equally daring in content and form, and in the originality of the adequacy of one to the other, it won the Silver Bear at Berlin.
