Sokuro emigrated from Burkina Faso fifteen years earlier and lives in a town in northern Italy with his father and his little brother Nassir. Sokuro decides to visit his mother, who still lives in their native village; he then marries young Guienne, and thus restores a bond with his own origins. However, right after the wedding, Sokuro is obliged to come back to Italy to keep his job. While his wife waits for the money and documents to be in order to join him in the “pays des blancs,” he goes back to his work and family routine. Sokuro lives as a foreigner in a land that has seen him grow up. It is the beginning of a tormented long-distance relationship in which the lives of the young husband and wife are torn between the hopes of immigration and the contradictions of rural traditions.

Mathieu Volpe, film director invites us to follow Sokuro over a long period of time. Through a few key moments in the love story between Sokuro and Nassira, he offers another perspective on economic migration, which through this embodied representation takes on a more intimate quality. Regret, nostalgia and lack are the side effects of these reluctant exiles, done out of necessity rather than desire, that are too often kept in the shadows. By offering faces and bodies to a current topic, by embodying it and taking the time to explore its complexity, documentary cinema allows to deepen our reflection; Sokuro and Nassira’s contradictory yet profoundly human aspirations as well as their story is superimposed over the media narratives around the subject, enriching and humanising them.