This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Ze do Burro is not a Candomble priest, and he never claims to be one. He is a farmer, and when his donkey falls deathly ill he makes the kind of promise ordinary people in Bahia have made for generations, a vow at a terreiro to the orisha Iansa that if the animal lives, he will carry a wooden cross the forty six kilometers to Saint Barbara Church in Salvador. Iansa and Saint Barbara are venerated together in syncretic Afro-Brazilian devotion, the orisha and the Catholic saint treated by many worshippers as two names for a connected reality, and Ze's vow is built on exactly that overlap rather than against it.
The donkey lives, and Ze keeps his word, walking the distance with his wife Rosa. What he does not expect is that the parish priest, Father Olavo, will refuse to let a cross that began life as a terreiro promise cross the threshold of his church. Anselmo Duarte's 1962 film, adapted from Dias Gomes's stage play, spends its running time on the standoff that follows outside the church doors, as journalists sensationalize Ze's land pledge into political rhetoric, Candomble worshippers try to make him a symbol of their own cause, and the police eventually intervene with fatal consequences. Nothing in the film shows or describes the closed initiation ceremonies of the terreiro; its entire subject is a layperson's public devotion and the two institutions that could not agree on what to do with it.
The film won the Palme d'Or at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, the only Brazilian film to hold that honor to date, awarded by a jury that included Francois Truffaut among its members.