While on vacation in Bordeaux, four-year-old Lili and her brothers, aged nine and twenty, are left to fend for themselves when their flamboyant mother goes home to her restaurant-disco business in Gabon without them. Torn between the desire to return to her lost paradise and the duty to seize the chance to make her mother proud, Lili grows up developing strategies to survive, find success, and return to the bright lights of her native Africa.