It’s 1939, and the world is teetering on the edge. On the day World War Two breaks out, a group of people discuss the state of the world in a little bar on a South American beach, far away from the front. A Brazilian communist faces off against a Portuguese capitalist; an Argentinian fascist against a Trotskyist French actress. On this remote sandbank, they all defend their ideologies that have been overtaken by reality. Parallels with the contemporary rise of extremist ideologies in Brazil (and around the globe) are hard to ignore.

When Cunda, a man living deep in the Brazilian rainforest, is bitten by a snake, he has a hallucination of four chimpanzees. Once he recovers, he is shocked to find the four chimpanzees waiting for him at home, and, believing them to be special, decides to take them to the city in order to sell them.

Laura goes to Buenos Aires and falls for the photographer Guilherme. When she returns to Brazil, her homeland, she discovers Guilherme is actually her fiancé's best friend.