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.

O is a young, vivacious photographer who falls in love with Rene. While their relationship seems like a storybook romance at first, everything changes when he sends her to a place called Roissy, where women are subjected to intense physical and psychological S&M training to make them the perfect slaves.

When Cunda, a man living deep in the Brazilian rainforest, is bitten by a snake, he has a hallucination of four chimpanzees. Once he recovers, he is shocked to find the four chimpanzees waiting for him at home, and, believing them to be special, decides to take them to the city in order to sell them.