This French thriller begins with a flashback to a small village dance where a six-year-old girl is kidnapped and killed. Seventeen years later the murder remains unsolved. The girl's parents Caroline and Chris have gone on with separate lives Caroline remarried and had another daughter while Chris became an alcoholic. The two are thrown back together when each begin receiving strange messages that imply their daughter has returned from the dead for vengeance. They contact a police detective (the lover of Caroline's best friend) who finds the case intriguing and decides to reopen it. Unfortunately, as soon as he begins questioning the old suspects, people begin to die.
France, 1915. Young and radiantly beautiful Centaine de Thiry is the happiest woman in the world: in a few more hours she will be married to pilot Michael Courteney, the love of her life. But fate has it otherwise: Michael is shot down in a reconnaissance plane shortly before his wedding. Life has lost its meaning for Centaine. When the young woman realizes soon afterwards that she is expecting a baby, her zest for live is revived. She decides to give birth to the child in South Africa, the home country of her deceased fiancé.
An old couple, Eugenie and Armand, have been living in Paris since 1921 part of the wave of post-war immigration from Martinique. Eugenie, a former dancer with Josephine Baker's Black Revue has become a professional quimboiseuse (practising black magic) for a white clientele. Armand who had been a servant is retired. Now they are both old and bitter and still quarreling with each other. One day they set out, arm-in-arm for a last promenade in the metropolis.
In Jean Rouch's cinematic reinterpretation of Julius-Amédée Laou's theatrical work, a freshly appointed nurse steps into the chaotic world of a psychiatric ward. Tasked with nurturing the minds within, she forms a profound connection with a patient from Martinique who has been confined within the institution's walls for half a century. As their relationship deepens, the lines between reality and delusion blur, weaving a complex narrative of human connection and psychological intrigue.
Aboard a giant slave ship in an abandoned Citroën factory, the history of the West Indies is traced through several centuries of French oppression. The ship becomes a stage for the people to tell stories via song and dance—from their enslavement to their displacement in Metropolitan France.