A slyly entertaining mixture of anthropology, black humor, gorgeous color photography, 16th-century history, political allegory, ubiquitous nudity, and unsettling prophecy, Nelson Pereira dos Santos' How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman marks an important step forward in the Cinema Novo movement that dos Santos himself helped to found with his ground-breaking Vidas Secas in 1963. A Frenchman captured by Indians tries nobly to integrate himself with the savage mind, but true incorporation into the tribe is ultimately possible in only one way: through the stomach. Dos Santos' film nearly caused a riot when shown at Cannes and finally had to be withdrawn - officially for reasons of “excessive nudity,” although many observers felt that the spectacle of a Frenchman being eaten in this sweetly menacing comedy was more than the French themselves could bear.