This short film follows Pelé, a retired nurse who looks back on his time as a Mateus in the century-old Bumba Meu Boi group, Boi Tira-Teima. As he builds a new boi for the festival, he revisits the defining moments of his journey as a performer, carnival artist, and son of Mestre Gerson, the group’s former patriarch. The film explores how the way we carry our memories of the past shapes who we become in the present.
In order to study fashion in so-desired Paris, a young country girl who hates Carnival travels to Rio de Janeiro to try to get support from the most famous designer in Brazil. Set on sneaking into the sewing team of one of the biggest samba schools, she will discover that Carnival only lasts for a week, but a love story can change her entire life.
Young lovers Orfeu and Eurydice run through the favelas of Rio during Carnaval, on the lam from a hitman dressed like Death and Orfeu's vengeful fiancée Mira and passing between moments of fantasy and stark reality. This impressionistic retelling of the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice introduced bossa nova to the world with its soundtrack by young Brazilian composers Luiz Bonfá and Antonio Carlos Jobim.
The film depicts Bruno's encounter with an old flame at the Recife airport. He then recalls the moments spent with Alice during a carnival, and his feelings start to resurface. But could that passion have been just a creation of his mind?
During Carnival in São Paulo, a young man and young woman who knew each other as children meet again after many years and the social barriers that have kept them apart. Bad decisions lead the boy to hide with the girl inside a whale float.
Juana, a young woman in her twenties sets out on a backpacking trip to the northwest of Argentina. Her aim is to find some places and people that appear in a series of photographs that she carries with her. As the adventure goes by, Juana finds out that the deepest meaning of the trip was but the simple fact that she has travelled through the experience itself.
Matheus, a young man with self-steem problems, goes to his grandmother's house to spend the carnaval with his family. There, he sees his old friends and finds himself atracted to a mysterious masked person who will send him on a journey of self discovery that will change his relationship with his father.
The Mangueira slum is the scenario where Tantinho and the old samba composers remember stories about the slums and samba.