At the heart of this film lies a question of mourning: what gestures are left to us to acknowledge that a life once existed, once the dead have become anonymous and their traces survive only in fragments? It returns to the landscape of the penal colony in French Guiana, where architectural remains exist in uneven states of disappearance — some entirely overtaken by vegetation, others half-covered, others restored. To film these structures is to attend to what time erases, and what it spares, unevenly.

Artificial flowers left on the graves of present-day Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni introduce another relationship to time and loss. Mimicking real flowers in form and color, they escape the cycle those originals are bound to: they do not wilt, decay, or return to the earth. Through editing, Ben Slimane nonetheless invents an artificial cycle of transformation for them, setting back into motion what the plastic sought to fix in place.