Paixão e Acaso

Cabral is a writer who decides to spend his summer writing a series about love stories. It is then that he begins to look back over his life and his works. He is married to Glorinha, a woman twenty years younger than him, with whom he has a daughter, the young Samanta. Glorinha dreams of having a second child, but Cabral rejects the woman's desire, creating a stalemate between the two.

On a Sunday, the actors Maria Ribeiro, Fernanda Torres, Wagner Moura, Carolina Dieckmann, Sophie Charlotte, Mateus Solano, Alexandre Nero and Du Moscovis have lunch at one of their houses. The occasion gives way to an incredibly sincere debate on the art of acting, the profession and, above all, the doubts about love and life.

Four actresses in their mid-forties get together in the afternoon to write a play about their own experiences. But the director isn't satisfied with the outcome.

In Rio de Janeiro, a successful yet underpaid young accountant lives with his pregnant wife in small apartment in middle class neighborhood of Copacabana. Unsatisfied with their way of life, the couple decides to accept the offer of becoming housekeepers of a rich man's vacation residence in a beach town.

Five segments about the hardships faced by people living in slums on hills in Rio de Janeiro.

The film uses delicacy and humor to describe the authoritarian functioning of a typically Brazilian 1950 family in Rio de Janeiro. The family is headed by a matriarch anxiously waiting for the night to hear Carlos Lacerda. The intense emotional plot highlights the absurdity of the characters' behavior.

A few weeks before Carnival, slum boys organize huntings for stray cats, whose leather can be used in Samba percussion instruments, like the Tamborim, a small drum.

Situated just above the awe-inspiring Ipanema beach in Rio is the Cantagalo slum. Every day, floods of Cantagalo residents make their way down the mountain, only to disappear into their surroundings as part of the invisible working-class that cleans apartments, works in restaurants, and sells food along the scenic, sun-drenched shores. Young Dé (Thiago Martins) is just such a man. Dé lives with his mother Bernadette (Cyria Coentro) in a cramped Cantagalo apartment, selling hot dogs on the beach in order to make the rent. His brother Beto was killed when Dé was just a young boy, and his adopted brother Carlão (Rocco Pitanga) has been jailed for a robbery that he didn't commit. One day, while working on the beach, Dé meets Nina (Vitória Frate). Nina is the only child of a successful lawyer named Evandro (Paulo César Grande), who's none to happy to discover that his daughter is dating a member of the lower class. How...

Cabral is a 60 year old playwright who's married to Glorinha, an actress who's 20 years younger than him. They've been together for half of her live, and now they're getting bored...

A volatile young man, Edu is a typical Rio de Janeiro middle-class kind, who flirts with multiple women at the same time. None of them, however, had managed to make him fall in love, until he met with mysterious Tatiana.