João Victor Menezes

Luiza, a shy, awkward 15 year-old girl from Rio, dreams of being an artist. Her life is just starting to make sense when Luiza's world falls apart when her mother suffers an acute schizophrenic episode. Determined to hold her family together, Luiza must find the strength to face fear, loneliness and discrimination as she takes over the household and her mother's care.

The filme relates how a victory - winning a scholarship to an elite private school - may become an obstacle race for an impoverished young person.

In 1856, the emperor Dom Pedro II lived a marriage of appearances with Teresa Cristina, with whom he was forced to marry at a young age by his parents' political alliance, having two daughters with her: Isabel and Leopoldina. He truly loves Countess Luisa, a cultured and time-ahead woman who fights for the abolitionist cause and women's rights, married to Eugenio, the emperor Napoleon's cousin. At the same time there are sisters Pilar and Dolores: the first went to a convent after her mother's death in childhood, growing up among books and dreaming of studying medicine - inspired by the story of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first doctor in the world -, while the second stayed at home to take care of her father, Colonel Eudoro, growing up repressed, illiterate and without vanity.