In the words of the director, a movie about 'the colonizers in the view of the colonized', the movie presents a series of disconnected happenings throughout Europe and Brazil emphasizing the perception of human life as trance-like experiences and thus offering a view of the human history as a connection of symbolic behavior.

The film, created in exile from 1971 to 1973 between Cuba and Rome, is considered a "semi-finished" work by Glauber Rocha. It has a certain pedagogical character and seeks, through dialectical editing, to conduct a critical review of colonization, class struggle, messianism, and the establishment of populist governments in the Third World. There is a chronology in the events presented, which, supported by extensive iconography (films, engravings, photos, etc.), create "free" associations that allow the viewer a "polyphonic" view of the "History of Brazil."