After the death of his son and the rituals of lamentation and burial, a desperate Kapor Indian goes to see the ‘Pajé’, a kind of healing priest who suggests increasingly harsh tests to escape his torment: break his household objects, burn his house, go to war, then, all in vain, leave in search of Maira, the paradise where Indians go after death. In this quest, which he carries out with his wife and children, he will experience setbacks and hardships before finally throwing himself into Maira, the river where he will die. The film was shot in a village belonging to the Kapor tribe.
‘I had long wanted to film the life of the Brazilian Indian, his greatness and his decadence, and I recreated the story by moving out of the realm of anthropology and into that of fiction’. Gustavo Dahl
