The first scene in Manoel de Oliveira’s A TALKING PICTURE depicts Rosa Maria (Leonor Silveira), a young history professor, and her seven-year-old daughter Maria Joana (Filipa de Almeida) on a bucolic cruise through the Mediterranean Sea. Rosa’s purpose for this trip is twofold: to join her husband in Bombay, India, for a family vacation, and to acquire first-hand knowledge of––and introduce her daughter to––historical sites at the various cities along their journey.

Starting in their homeland Portugal and moving through Marseilles (France), the ruins of Pompeii (Italy), Ceuta (Spanish Morocco), Athens (Greece), the pyramids of Egypt and Istanbul (Turkey), Rosa narrates to her young daughter some of the most important events in Western history––sometimes struggling to separate myths and speculations from concrete marks of irrefutable histories.

On the cruise, Rosa and Maria eventually befriend three famous women of different nationalities: a renowned French executive (Catherine Deneuve), a former Italian model (Stefania Sandrelli) and a celebrity Greek actress (Irene Papas). Dining with the ship’s captain (John Malkovich), an American of Polish origin, all four passengers exchange pieces of their past while talking about the legacies of Western history––each speaking in his or her native languages.

But the curious tourists are forced to stop discussing the rhetoric of tradition and history when a strange threat disturbs the cruise, menacing the ship and the life of all of its passengers.