Direction de la Cinematographie Nationale

In West Africa during the late 17th century, King Adanggaman leads a war against his neighboring tribes, ordering his soldiers to torch enemy villages, kill the elderly and capture the healthy tribesmen to sell to the European slave traders. When his village falls prey to one of Adanggaman's attacks, Ossei manages to escape, but his family is murdered except for his captured mother. Chasing after the soldiers in an effort to free her, Ossei is befriended by a fierce warrior named Naka.

When a woman shelters a group of girls from suffering female genital mutilation, she starts a conflict that tears her village apart.

On 2 January 1899, starting from the French Sudan, a French column under the command of the captains Voulet and Chanoine is sent against the black Sultan Rabah in what is now the Cameroon. Those captains and their African mercenary troops destroy and kill everything they find on their path. The French authorities try to stop them sending orders and a second troop but the captains kill the emissaries who reach them. Sarraounia, queen of the Aznas, have heard about the exactions. Clever in war tactics and in witchcraft, she decides to resist and stop those mad men.

The movie shows the rise and fall of a cruel and despotic village chief Guimba, and his son Jangine in a fictional village in the Sahel of Mali.

After Polish-born writer-director Janusz Mrozowski, a French resident for the past 30 years, made a series of 30-minute films based on African writings, he was approached by Africans to do a cinematic survey of past events in African history. Filming in Burkina Faso, Mrozowski responded with this comedy about a dictator kidnapped from the present-day and taken back through the mists of time. There he meets the mother of humanity, Lucy, who teaches him the basics of sexual equality. By the time he returns to the present, he's also received an education in 16th-century slave-trading and European influences on Africa.

Young people call into question their village's customs and create an agricultural co-operative.