Ozualdo Candeias has the distinction of being one of the few filmmakers to come to the craft from truck driving! Making his first feature at age forty-five, this self-taught "primitive" impressed his colleagues as the most marginal of the marginal. The film became the first in the Udigrudi (Underground) movement, the marginal Cinema Nôvo or the revolution within the revolution. Set among the slum dwellers along the banks of São Paulo's Tietê river-even then, extremely polluted-the film tells two surreally tragic tales of love with few words and a torrent of images. "A margem unpretentiously communicates a feeling of rare poetry and subdued audacity. Its subtle modulation of fantasy and realism recalls the Vigo of L'Atalante... The film literalizes the metaphor of 'garbage aesthetic,' eliciting flowers from evil and stealing beauty from squalor." (Robert Stam)