This film on the peasants' cultural movement in Nicaragua shows how music, theater, and poetry are part of the peasantry's everyday life, and also part of their efforts to improve their lives.

The Peasant Movement for Artistic and Dramatic Expression (MECATE) is organized in villages throughout the country; it's goal is to develop artistic potential in the countryside. In MECATE: A NEW SONG participants in four cultural workshops present examples of their warm, unpretentious work.

The theater group Los Alpes, for example, uses masks made from gourds and paper-mache in their skits about injustice and backwardness and to comment on topics such as alcoholism and machismo. In another town, a group of children have learned to make home-made instruments from rubber tubings, cans, buckets, and string, and now they entertain their community with music and song.

MECATE: A NEW SONG lets us see how cultural expression is changing, developing and expanding, as a reflection of changing lives in today's Nicaragua.