Based on the novel by Antonio Di Benedetto written in 1956, on Don Diego de Zama, a Spanish officer of the seventeenth century settled in Asunción, who awaits his transfer to Buenos Aires.

The film tells the story of a boy who is responsible, along with his father, for finding the cure for an illness that is contracted after the person takes a fright.

The tale of a son and his father separately plotting to escape the desolation of their lives in the lurid underworld of Brazil's sex industry.

The emotive journey of a former schoolteacher who writes letters for illiterate people, and a young boy whose mother has just died, as they search for the father he never knew.