It’s 1939, and the world is teetering on the edge. On the day World War Two breaks out, a group of people discuss the state of the world in a little bar on a South American beach, far away from the front. A Brazilian communist faces off against a Portuguese capitalist; an Argentinian fascist against a Trotskyist French actress. On this remote sandbank, they all defend their ideologies that have been overtaken by reality. Parallels with the contemporary rise of extremist ideologies in Brazil (and around the globe) are hard to ignore.

Homage to Fernando Pessoa and the city that lies next to the Tagus River.

The tragic story of Vincent van Gogh broadened by focusing as well on his brother Theodore, who helped support Vincent. Based on the letters written between the two.

The film follows four families, with different nationalities (French, German, Russian and American) but with the same passion for music, from the 1930s to the 1960s. The various story lines cross each other time and again in different places and times, with their own theme scores that evolve as time passes. The main event in the film is the Second World War, which throws the stories of the four musical families together and mixes their fates. Although all characters are fictional, many of them are loosely based on historical musical icons (Édith Piaf, Josephine Baker, Herbert von Karajan, Glenn Miller, Rudolf Nureyev, etc.) The Boléro dance sequence at the end brings all the threads together.