A circus troupe is harassed by the military police for instigating a strike on a large Alentejo estate. The workers demand Agrarian Reform, but the land owner wants to maintain the status quo. On the run, the group meets a strange aristocratic family in physical and moral decline. Shot in the post-revolutionary summer of 1975, with music by Sérgio Godinho, the film acts as an essay on the contradictions of the revolutionary process, the persistence of the patriarchy and a possible future, which, for Fonseca e Costa (born in Angola), is represented by Africa.