A foreign doctor (Alex Descas) discovers the "heart of darkness" in the Wolof village where he works, when a mentally ill child he befriends becomes the scapegoat for "bad spirits." Michael, an idealistic foreign doctor, has had little success bringing the promises of modernity to a dusty village of the damned in the Sahel. His lover, Sunma, a teacher and native of the place, has no illusions about the village, believing it to be "a world which will cannibalize its children" (according to a Wolof incantation) in a futile effort to compensate for human powerlessness. She simply wants to live and love - and leave before the killing starts. But Michael is transfixed; he stays and tries, ineffectively, to prevent the villagers from sacrificing a mentally disturbed mute boy he has befriended. Perhaps Michael sees in himself, even in his hope for scientific progress, a reflection of the villagers' own horror at human fate. Joseph Gai Ramaka, Senegal, 1997, 26m., color. In French & Wolof with English subtitles