Synopsis
The film begins with a ship arriving in a harbor in southern France carrying Diouana who has been invited by a French- based Senegalese couple to join and stay with them. In Dakar, before Senegalese independence, she worked for them as a nanny and expects to do the same work in Antibes (France).
Diouana had heard wonderful stories about the colonial motherland. In the flashbacks that take place in Dakar before her emigration, she is clearly ecstatic about her upcoming trip. She talks of the shops and the new fashionable clothes she will buy. She imagines that her relatives will die of envy when they think of her living the 'good life' in France.
She soon finds out that the couple can no longer afford the many servants they had in Africa and she is expected to be an all-purpose maid as well as a nanny. Her life is a dreary routine of cleaning and cooking in their small apartment, and she is driven to desperation. Despondent and spiritually broken, the couple's only response is to ask if she is ill.