The story of a young black man, Héracles, who after being released from a juvenile institution, tries to apply for his first honest job as a motorcycle delivery boy. To get the job, he has to perform 12 hard tasks in São Paulo.

This is the story of Vicente, a successful, married, economist with a nine-year-old son. It also tells the story of Antônio, the same man, living as a hugadores—one of the homeless, trash scavengers who live and work in Brazil’s enormous garbage dumps. Vicente seems to have it all, but as we watch his life begins to crumble little by little. Meanwhile, Antônio, already at rock bottom, struggles to rebuild his life.

Bernadinho and Pedro are students and face the classic tasks of fulfilling school obligations, taking good grades, being well behaved and complying with school rules, increasingly elaborated thanks to director Ademar. Frustrated, Pedro ends up finding a diary of how to cause chaos in school without being caught, which leads the two friends to follow the tips of the notebook.

Eric is an actor who's a jack-of-all-trades all the time, but almost never acts. He auditions all the time, but is never called back.

Neto is a middle class teenager living a normal life. After his father finds a marijuana cigarette on his pocket, he is sent to a mental institution, where he gets to know a completely absurd and inhumane reality in which people are devoured by a corrupt and cruel system.

December, the 25th. A hanged up man tries to remember the previous night's events of a Christmas's Dinner. He asks his wife what he did and what he talked about that he doesn't remember at all. For his astonishment, he discovers that he almost only talked about a Christmas's Even once lost in his memories. In a kind of journey into his self through an evasive, enigmatic, mysterious and poetic dialog with his wife, he rescues his own childhood and revalues his present.

In the periphery of São Paulo, the pregnant single mother Cleuza works as maid in the apartment of a middle-class family. Each of her sons has a different unknown father: the oldest, Dênis, has a baby son that lives with his mother and he works as motorcycle courier.