Hammurabi tells the story of Vitão, a boy who works as a delivery boy. Outraged by the poor working conditions, Vitão decides to steal one of the deliveries from the Arab restaurant Hammurabi. This seemingly simple robbery triggers a chain reaction when a dealer receives a message to fetch packages of drugs from the same building as Vitão. Due to a simple typo, the dealer ends up going to Vitão’s apartment and putting the boy in the middle of a much bigger mess than he could have imagined.

At a bar table, old samba singer and composer Adoniran Barbosa tells a young waiter stories about a São Paulo that no longer exists. He fondly remembers the maloca where he lived with Joca and Mato Grosso, their passion for Iracema and other characters eternalized in his sambas, chronicles of a metropolis swallowed up by the voracious appetite of progress.