Barely out of prison, Léa returns to Sol Nascente in Brasília, one of the largest favelas in Latin America. She joins her sister Chitara, who, together with her all-woman gang, steals oil from underground pipelines, refining it and selling it to a secret network of motorcyclists. The gang, some of them played by amateur actors, claim the streets for themselves in radical opposition to Jair Bolsonaro’s authoritarian government and in the name of ex-prisoners and the oppressed. The fictional flows into the documentary as staged scenes are mixed with real events. Depicting protests, singing, and dancing at the real locations, but always under the strong influence of genre cinema, Mato seco em chamas is a post-apocalyptic film that artfully weaves its way between science fiction, heist film, and queer western.