In Dom José’s little circus, it’s the fakir Alikan who performs the riskiest acts: stabbing himself, swallowing molten tin, and so on. But the circus is in trouble. The performers eat the circus animals. As a last resort, they invent a terrible act: Alikan eats people. The audience comes running. Alikan escapes with his wife and, following a series of adventures, arrives in a festive town where he performs an extraordinary act: the living crucifix. He is a huge success, but his act leads him to prison, where he discovers the key to success: fasting.
“Peixoto and I came up with the idea of making a film about hunger that wasn’t a documentary. We looked for a character who could symbolize the problem of hunger: the Fakir. Using this character as a starting point, we wanted to reconstruct, through the absurd, the whole problem of hunger in a country like ours – a sort of continent centered on hunger.” Maurice Capovilla
