Set amidst the songs, dance and scenery of Bahia, heart of the African influence in contemporary Brazil, this film, based on a novel by Jorge Amado, penetrates the realities of a society supposedly without racial prejudice. A black man and a white woman, both raised in the bourgeois household of her parents, share a passionate love, the more obsessive because it cannot be consummated. Separated by the suspicious paterfamilias, they go their separate ways-into an amazing sea of experiences-but look for each other ceaselessly until tragedy brings them together, too late. Writing for the London Film Festival, Derek Malcolm noted, "Chiefly, this is a film not about racial prejudice as much as social and cultural inhibitions"; while dos Santos said, on adapting a novel written in 1935, "Society has changed a lot but relations between blacks and whites, poor and rich, have not changed much. I find the novel very modern..."