Glauber Rocha's most controversial film at home and influential film abroad, this is a work of great imagination and beauty, an operatic spectacle that nevertheless conveys a very true sense of the violence and irrationality that characterize political life in a country scarred by underdevelopment. "Although the style is irregular," Rocha said, "you will see...that the camera is always positioned as in a documentary." The film, made in the wake of the coup of 1964, takes place in a fictitious country, Eldorado, where a populist governor clashes with a dictatorial leader. The protagonist is a poet-journalist who abandons his elite milieu for radical politics, only to become as disenchanted with his new comrades as he was with the cowardice of the intellectual class. "Saturated with anger, eloquence, personal and collective hysteria, (this) is in no sense a Hollywood film, for it investigates rather than exploits its emotions." (Robert Stam)