Ebbo and Vera Velten have spent the better part of the past twenty years living in different African countries. Ebbo is the manager of a sleeping sickness programme. His work is fulfilling. Vera, however, feels increasingly lost in Yaounde’s ex-pat community. She can’t bear the separation from her 14-year-old daughter, Helen, who is attending boarding school in Germany. Ebbo must give up his life in Africa or he risks losing the woman he loves. But his fear of returning to a land now remote to him increases with each passing day. Years later. Alex Nzila, a young French doctor of Congolese origin, travels to Cameroon to evaluate a development project. It’s been a long time since he set foot on this continent, but, instead of finding new prospects, he encounters a destructive, lost man. Like a phantom, Ebbo slips away from his evaluator.

Carlo Ercole, a maestro of Italian cinema, asks his assistants to depart immediately for the Central African rainforest to find some Pygmies, "the incarnation of life", for the film he plans to shoot in Paris. Hardly cut out for such an adventure, Marc and Olivier are thrown into the maelstrom of a major African city. With the help of their beautiful guide, Désirée, they eventually make it into the equatorial rainforest, headed for a Pygmy Utopia.