Theater director asks his actors for a research on human cruelty and misery in Brazil, while trying to raise funds for his next production, a play based on a story by Machado de Assis, "A Causa Secreta" (The Secret Cause). The troupe oblige and go around town witnessing long lines in National Health Services, inhuman conditions in public hospitals and poor people being constantly humiliated. They find people are becoming indifferent to human suffering.

A Causa Secreta

Disagreements, incommunicability between people. What is said is not heard, what is heard is not understood. Everything is ambiguous. What appears to be is not, except poetry.

Eu Sei Que Você Sabe

Filmed over a five-year period, Chronically Unfeasible dissects Brazilian problems, using six people who meet in a restaurant in São Paulo as models to illustrate political, sociological and economic disparities between Brazil's upper and lower classes.