Shot with scarce material resources and in Super Hi-8, this audacious film debut overflows with imagination and lyricism. Bia Lessa has been extensively involved with the theater, opera and video, and Dany Roland with acting and music. Their film transposes Thomas Mann's classic story "The Holy Sinner" to the landscape of Ceará, in the Brazilian northeast, whose inhabitants reinterpret this classic European text-the tale of a knight, incestuously begotten, who unknowingly marries his mother and, after a seventeen-year exile, is chosen by God to become pope. The vigor and grace of the performances are spellbinding; with religious rites, colorful processions, passionate expressions of love, this is a unique work of art where the everyday turns holy.-Denis DeLaRoca