In 2008 a corpse was identified by the police with the birth certificate of the Brazilian writer João Paulo Cuenca in a invaded building in the historical and bohemian neighborhood of Lapa, downtown Rio de Janeiro. Inspired by this fact, “The Death of J.P. Cuenca” investigates the identity-theft case in a phantasmagoric city undergoing a lot of changes. If in fiction and crime news pages it is a cliché for living people to steal the identity of dead ones to start a new life, what we have here is the opposite case: someone who steals the identity of a living person to die in his place.