A film adaptation of one of the great oral epics of the Bambara people, set during the powerful Mali Empire of the 13th century. Tells the story of Nianankoro, a young Bambara warrior destined to destroy a corrupt older society, the secret Komo cult, and with it his father, and, inevitably, himself. The climactic flash of light which floods the screen at the film's end ushers in a new purified world order and captures the Bambara belief in time as circular, not linear, always returning to that initial "brightness" which created the world.