Sinhá Moça (Little Missy) is a Brazilian telenovela produced and broadcast in the 6:00 PM timeslot by TV Globo, from 28 April to 14 November 1986, in 168 episodes. It substituted De Quina pra Lua and was succeeded by Direito de Amar.
Written by Benedito Ruy Barbosa, it is freely inspired by the novel of the same name by Maria Dezonne Pacheco Fernandes, with the collaboration of Edmara Barbosa and Edilene Barbosa and direction of Reynaldo Boury and Jayme Monjardim.
Contents
Synopsis
The story revolves around Sinhá Moça (Lucélia Santos), the rebellious daughter of Colonel Ferreira, the baron of Araruna (Rubens de Falco), who is a ruthless slaveowner, her submissive mother Cândida (Elaine Cristina), and the young Dr. Rodolfo Garcia Fontes (Marcos Paulo), an active Republican abolitionist, before the difficulties of the campaign for the abolition of slavery.
Pro-slavery Monarchists and anti-slavery Republicans confront themselves in Araruna, a small fictional town in the interior of the state of São Paulo, in 1886, two years before the promulgation of the Lei Áurea ("Golden Law"), that abolished slavery nationwide in Brazil.
The two meet on the train, when Sinhá Moça, after finishing her studies in the city of São Paulo, returns to Araruna. Like Rodolfo, she has abolitionist ideas and criticizes her father's attitudes, fighting for abolition. Sinhá Moça, along with Rodolfo and other abolitionists, invades slave quarters at night, freeing the black slaves and giving them to abolitionist associations, which guide them towards freedom.
On the other side of the story is Dimas (Raymundo de Souza) (who is actually the boy Rafael, ex-freed slave) and his stubborn struggle to destroy the Baron, his true father with the slave of the farm Maria das Dores (Dhu Moraes). Before being sold by the Baron, Rafael was a close friend of Sinhá Moça, with whom he spent his childhood. After being emancipated, he takes the name Dimas and becomes the right hand of the typographer Augusto (Luiz Carlos Arutin), a convicted abolitionist, arousing love in Juliana (Luciana Braga), his granddaughter.
