Ramón del Valle-Inclán

In Santa Fe de Tierra Firme, an imaginary Latin American country, the indigenous dictator Santos Banderas rules with an iron fist. A group of rebels trying to seize power by force while some liberals try a change of government legally.

A work of Valle-Inclán, the story takes place in Galicia in the early twentieth century. To escape poverty, the wife of a sacristan uses a hydrocephalic child as a sideshow attraction. This causes a confrontation with her sister-in-law.

Mari Gaila (Silvia Pinal), is an adulteress who lives between ragged, thieves, prostitutes, dwarfs and other misshapen beings, in a rare box at a country and a vague time. Her husband, is a poor sacristan who agrees with other relatives to do business with the display of his orphaned nephew, a mentally retarded dwarf. Caught in committing adultery with her lover, Mari Gaila is caged naked and punished by the people.

A child is witness to an assault on a monk by the gang of Lorenzo the Fifth. The monk escapes and takes refuge in the estate of Doña Carlota, a countess who lives with her son Juan and daughter Beatriz. Basilisa, the maid, conjures the devil to free her son from an irreversible illness, but to do so the evil must be transmitted to an innocent soul, and for that she chooses Beatriz. The child begins to be the victim of a possession, for which everyone blames the monk.