This is a film about unconditional love – the love of a mother for her daughter and of an aunt for her nephew – and about the lengths those women are prepared to go to in order to protect the ones they love…Márcia is a single mother with two grown-up children, who works as a cook and shares her home in a social housing estate with her sister Ivete, a hairdresser. One day, Cláudia, her daughter, a student nurse, who also works as a supermarket cashier, tells her that she has fallen in love with a married man that is much older than her. When Márcia finds out who he is, she realises that the relationship poses a terrible threat to her family… Meanwhile, her son Joca, a small-time drug pusher, tries to get one over on his own dealer, but the plan misfires and he gets caught. It is his aunt, Ivete, who pays the ultimate price in her attempt to save him. 

Statement of intention

“We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep”.
Shakespeare

“The only thing any of us wants in life is to be loved without explanations.We want unconditional love, without having to give or receive explanations.The deepest love is that which has no reason to exist at all.”
António Lobo Antunes


This quotation from Lobo Antunes encapsulates the central theme of the film –  the tragedy that results when real life collides with unconditional love, a love without explanations, that has no reason to exist at all.
 Unconditional love may be put to the test, but it is never put at risk. For, as Aristotle said, happiness is absolutely final; it is always chosen for itself alone, never as a means to an end. And in this film, all actions aim at achieving the happiness of a person that is loved. That is the purpose of the rest; all else occurs in function of it. The happiness of the loved person is always chosen as an end in itself, and never as a means.
 The film explores how love and affection manage to survive in the sterile environment of a deprived inner-city neighbourhood. In such a context – threatened by irredeemable circumstances, by ignorance, violence and the total absence of civilized values – love can be put under the microscope and its essence observed. 
The more arid the emotional landscape, the more unconditional and unquestionable any gesture of love becomes. This society is depicted in all its depravity in order to allow unconditional love to take shape. For it is only in a context of great violence that a blood bond can be truly put to the test.