16-year old teenager Abdou lives on the outskirts of Khouribga, a mining town exploiting phosphates. He is helpful and caring, simple and down to earth, incapable of harm, and is anxious to regain the gift of human dignity through learning how to read and write. His adoptive mother Mbarka, a midwife, and the neighbourhood’s healer protects her privileged status with ways that the laws of obscurantism allow her. Ch’Aayba, a thirty-year-old man, uncontrollable and ferociously cynical, is an eccentric pickpocket. Suffering from a skin disease, Abdou convinces him to come see Mbarka in order to get treatment for it: that’s how the fate of these three will entangle, twirling on the carousel of illusion.