Winner of the 1962 Palme d'or at Cannes, The Given Word was one of the first films to draw international attention to the new Brazilian cinema. Half angry neorealism, half Buñuelian satire, it centers around a rural peasant, Ze, who carries a massive wooden cross through thirty miles of parched countryside to the city to honor the saint who cured his sick donkey. When he finally collapses at his destination, a church with the saint's icon, the head priest sneeringly refuses him admittance, claiming that Ze's pilgrimage is based on pagan idolatry, black magic, and cannot represent "proper" faith. Ze, confused but stubborn, camps out on the church steps with his donkey and his cross, while behind him pimps, poets, policemen, and passersby create a groundswell of opinion, advice, and finally, action. At the end, the inflexibility of the Church (and of Ze's naive purity) becomes jammed against the film's pulsating vision of street life, all music, movement, and exuberant, cluttered noise.-J. Sanders