Josette is 80 and lives alone in Yaoundé, Cameroon. All six of her children have left for the West. She encourages them to build houses back in Cameroon, a ploy to bring them home to her. But the unexpected bond she forms with Sarah, a young woman from her neighbourhood, shatters everything she has built her life on: her family, her responsibilities, and her hopes. Josette is the director's mother. Auguste Bernard Kouemo Yanghu left Cameroon for France twenty years ago and, like the children in his film, he did not come back.

When he visited, he found the house empty and his mother alone in it, moving from room to room each day, keeping her children's plates ready for a homecoming that never came. He started filming her. The film took six years to come together. He thought it would be a documentary, then found he would rather imagine an ending than record one. We talk about the ones who leave, he says, and almost never about the ones who stay, and the ones who stay are mostly old and mostly alone. His first feature sits quietly with one of them, in a house built for a family that does not arrive, with the wind whistling through it.