In 1999, near the turn of the millennium, Fernando Cruz, a decadent octogenarian army colonel, kills himself in the garden of his house, leaving part of his inheritance to Juliana, his unrecognized daughter fruit of a relationship with a former housemaid. Juliana has never had any contact with her father and lives modestly with her grandmother, but the legacy left by the colonel reopens old wounds between the two and arouses conflicting feelings. She thinks of accepting her father's inheritance, even if he never took any interest in her, just to help her seriously ill grandmother. She goes against her own beliefs and her boyfriend's, Diogo, who is also a student and left-wing activist. While meeting with the late colonel's lawyer at the house where she spent her childhood while her mother worked, Juliana strolls through photographs, memories and sees many books on military strategy and praise for the dictatorship's achievements inBrazil. But one particular book called "Memoirs of a Guerrilla Soldier" catches her eye, and she decides to take it with her.Juliana's reading reveals the story of former guerrilla soldier João, a student who left the same university she studied to go underground in 1968 and join a guerrilla in the north of Brazil accompanied by his girlfriend Marta. In a flashback, we see that João survived after being chased by the military government, spent thirty days lost and alone in the middle of the Amazon jungle, sick with malaria,enduring endless rain, running from wild animals and seeing death at close range. Weak and losing his mind, he is able to reach the banks of the great Araguaia River; he passes out on a large beach of white sand. After being saved by local workers, he's found by the government's troops and arrested. Tied up, tortured and exposed in the public square next to the military camp set up in the small settlement, João is forced to recognize the bodies of dead guerrilla soldiers, including his partner Marta, before being sent to prison in Brasília. The image of Marta shot and lifeless completes the tragedy of his imprisonment and determines the end of his fight in the guerrilla.