旺妲是一个三十岁的女人，和母亲，同样吸毒的姐姐泽塔和她四岁的女儿生活在一起，每天除了外出批发点蔬菜水果拿到路边叫卖之外，绝大部分时间她都躲在自己污秽不堪的房间里吸食着可卡因，和姐姐争吵着毒品的分配不均，而她们的周围则住着一群同样被社会所遗忘的人，他们同样因吸毒而贫困，他们每天最大的快乐就是去旁边推土机所推倒的别人家废墟中抢出几件有用的物品，虽然有时只是一块破旧不堪的木板也够使他们高兴一阵了，随着季节的变换，蔬菜越来越难卖，旺妲坐在路边往往一天都无人问津，她的身体也越来越瘦弱，然而她却始终沉浸在毒品带来的快乐之中，这是她生命中唯一的安慰，而政府拆迁房屋的机器也即将推倒她的家，何去何从……

This Portuguese drama examines the daily life minutiae and intrigues of two scions of society in the rural village where they live. One is a wealthy landowner, the other a widowed aristocrat who lives in a world of her own. "Starting off from a fine novel by Carlos de Oliveira, Fernando Lopes doesn't so mush reconstitute a story, but rather defines an atmosphere parallel to that which exists in the literary work. The erosion of time, the crumbling of an epoch, the decline of a stately home, the disintegration of emotions: the film version of A Bee in the Rain talks about all these things, using a language that is sparse and unpolished, fascinating and at the same time repulsive in its disturbing silence"

The film was to be a documentary, but evolved during production to a fictional film. It nevertheless adheres strictly to the poems and letters exchanged by two of the most outstanding names of the Modernist Movement, Fernando Pessoa (in Lisbon) and Mário de Sá-Carneiro (in Paris). Their endless conversation was dramatically and suddenly terminated.

Following on from his earlier film A Ilha Dos Amores (1982) on the Portuguese writer Wenceslau Moraes (1855-1929), this documentary uses texts by Moraes, photographs, manuscripts, news film as well as visits to places where people still remember him.
Wenceslau José de Sousa de Moraes was born in Lisbon on the 30th May 1854.
After studying at the Naval College he served aboard several war ships of the Portuguese Navy. In 1885 he traveled for the first time to Macao, where he settled. There he was Deputy to the Captain of the Harbor, and teacher of Macao Secondary School since its creation in 1894. While there he married Vong-Io-Chan (aka Atchan), a Chinese woman of whom he had two sons, and established a friendship with Camilo Pessanha, a celebrated poet.
Meanwhile, in 1889, he traveled for the first time to Japan, a country that charmed him, and where he will return, in official duty, several times in the next few years. In 1897 he visits Japan with the Governor of Macao, and was received by the Emperor Meiji. The following year he deserted Atchan and his two sons, and moved to Japan, as consul in Kobe.
His life there is marked by his literary activity and by the chronicles he sends to several Portuguese newspapers and magazines, by his love affairs with two Japanese women (Ó-Yoné Fukumoto and Ko-Haru), and by his increasing "japonisation".
During the next thirty years Wenceslau de Moraes was to be the great Portuguese source of information about the East, sharing his intimate experiences of day-to-day life in Japan with his readers in Portugal, in a parallel activity to that of Lafcadio Hearn, of whom he was a contemporary.
Saddened by the death, due to illness, of Ó-Yoné, Wenceslau de Moraes renounced his post as consul, and moved to Tokushima, her birth place. There he lived with Ko-Haru, a niece of Ó-Yoné, with whom he shared his life until her death, also due to illness.
There he started to dress, eat and live like the Japanese, against a backdrop of growing hostility from the local inhabitants. Increasingly lonely, and with deteriorating health, Wenceslau de Moraes passed away, in Tokushima, in the 1st July 1929, without having ever returned to Europe.