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This film is by one of the founders of Brazilian "Cinema Novo," a style of filmmaking emphasizing native Brazilian themes and highly charged and stylized religious imagery. In Rio just before Carnaval (the local version of the raucous Mardi-Gras celebration) a girl deliberately smashes a small statue of the Virgin Mary. She receives an answer to her strange prayers in the form of a handsome musician. Their relationship, with its ins and outs, is taken up as a theme by the Samba Schools, and is told, to a samba beat, in the form of the story of Tristan and Isolde. By the end of the film, they have become the voodoo gods Oxossi and Iansan.