Mozambique-born Ruy Guerra learned filmmaking in Paris. His film The Guns is possibly the most explosive political film of Cinema Nôvo and the most purely Marxist. The setting is the Northeast, where starving migrants led by a beato worship an ox and pray for rain. Five soldiers are brought in to protect the harvest, destined to be trucked to the city, from these hungry souls. One of the truck drivers, Gaucho, becomes enraged at the pilgrims' apathy and commits a decisive act of defiance, suicidal but ultimately futile: "the violence of liberation" only succeeds if it puts food into the mouths of the liberated. Thus it is the ox whose death is called for. "The power of the film lies indeed in its objectivity. Far from being urged to admire or champion the peasants, we are, like Gaucho, enraged by their religious credulity...while the soldiers emerge, no less than the townspeople, as the corrupted victims of a system." (Nigel Andrews)