The film revolves around two characters, Mariana, a Portuguese nurse assigned to Cape Verde from Lisbon, and Leao, a black patient who awakes from a coma following a construction accident. Strangely, Leao resents being alive. He resents being back in Cape Verde, an enmity which Mariana senses and gradually begins to understand as the continuing legacy of both colonialism and the European slave trade begin to become apparent to her. It's a legacy that has scarred Cape Verde, and induced in Mariana a kind of coma or sickness akin to Leao's.