Bethânia returns to her land, where the family’s old sugar mill was built, the Wanderley Mill. Between photographs, fantastic creatures, bills to pay and workers claiming their rights to the land, Bethânia faces herself in a present where both the past and the future look menacing.

In Sugar, Sergio Oliveira and Renata Pinheiro trace the origins of inequality and racial tensions in modern-day Brazil to its centuries-long history of slavery. Mixing dreamlike sequences with harsher looks at reality, they build a bewitching atmosphere of menace that permeates every frame.