When the inmate Maria do Socorro Nobre reads an article about the Polish artist Franz Krajcberg in Veja magazine, she decides to write a letter to him. Socorro was sentenced to more than twenty-one years in a prison for women in Salvador, Bahia, while Franz is a tormented artist that lost his family and lived his childhood in a ghetto in Poland but survived the Holocaust. Franz moved to Brazil and recovered life wish living close to nature and inspires Socorro to dream with life again.

Brazilian badlands, April 1910. Tonho is ordered by his father to avenge the death of his older brother. The young man knows that if he commits this crime, his life will be divided in two: the twenty years he has already lived and the few days he has left to live, before the other family avenges their son's death. He is torn between fulfilling his ancestral duty and rebelling against it, urged by his younger brother Pacu. That's when a tiny travelling circus passes through the vast badlands where Tonho's family lives.

An emotional journey of a former school teacher, who writes letters for illiterate people, and a young boy, whose mother has just died, as they search for the father he never knew.