Iracema (an anagram for America) is a 14-year-old Indian girl who leaves her Amazon village to find out what life is like in the big city of Belem. There she survives by prostitution until she meets a truck driver on the Trans-Amazon Highway route who takes her on the road. The highway symbolizes the "new" Brazil of fantastic wealth and mobility, but for Iracema the journey leads straight back to the same life of resignation. Her abuse and humiliation mirror the ruthless destruction of the Brazilian landscape, the beauty and squalor of which is captured in Jorge Bodanzky's color camerawork. With riveting performances by the two leads, Bodanzky's semidocumentary approach to fiction ran counter to the dialectic/operatic approach of Glauber Rocha and the main Cinema Nôvo directors, but was no less revolutionary. Iracema shows the Brazil of the developing outback in images so graphic that the film was banned from release.