A mysterious man play by Luis Miguel Cintra enters the stage and presents "his case" about the fallacies of theater and its illusions. One by one all of the play's actors and technicians state their cases about what bothers them about the play and its relation to their own lives. An audience member then takes the stage to make a case for what the collective audience wants. This is followed by three consecutive but very different versions of the one act play: the first is a straightforward farce, the second is presented as a slapstick silent movie, and the third is performed with the dialogue read backwards. The stage performance ends with video footage of war and disasters from around the world and Pablo Picasso's painting Guernica. The entire film then shifts to a retelling of the Book of Job, with Cintra as Job and Bulle Ogier as his wife. This sequence ends with a close-up of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. My Case opened the 1986 Venice Film Festival and was released in 1987. Oliveira next made a satirical film in the tradition of Luis Buñuel, The Cannibals (Os Canibais) in 1988. The film is based on a short story by Álvaro Carvalhal and stars Luis Miguel Cintra, Leonor Silveira and Diogo Dória. José Régio first showed Oliveira the little known story, and Oliveira decided to make the film his only opera in collaboration with composer Joao Paes. The film also contains a demonic narrator Niccolo who appears and disappears from scenes magically. In the film, the beautiful young Margarida (Silveira) falls in love with the mysterious Viscount of Aveleda (Cintra), while rejecting the advances of the notorious Don João (Dória). On their wedding night, the Viscount reveals to Margarida that his great mystery is that he has no arms or legs and is "a living corpse". Margarida throws herself out of their bedroom window in horror and the Viscount attempts to drink poison but rolls into the fireplace instead, singing an aria as he burns to death. Just then Don João enters intending to murder the Viscount in jealously and witnesses the Viscounts death. The next morning, Margarida's father, brothers and family magistrate wake up and want to be served breakfast, but find an empty house. They look for the Viscount, but only discover a strange meat cooking in the fireplace, and conclude that it is a strange