In the early 1920s, Georges Laffont, traumatised by the horrors of World War I, decides to leave his life behind to travel to Upper Volta in West Africa, in the company of Diofo, an artist and also a survivor of the Great War. Georges returns with a hoard of tribal masks to Paris where his brother Marcel, a war veteran who has become deaf during the conflict, lives with their mother. Desperately trying to put himself back together, Georges will find solace in Hélène, a sign language teacher.