"I traveled across Mauritania to find a tree that I saw from my window in Belgium. It wasn't a mythical tree, but rather one that could be anywhere. On my way, I met men and women who shared their perception of this quest and in doing so, in a roundabout way they shared some of their visions of the world and existence. For some, my tree was the sign from the spirits, of the invisible or a call from light. For others, it was the symbol of a history, a culture or the end of a period in time. For yet others, it was a tree that you see only when you get lost".

The four stories in this film take us from Belgium to the banks of the Senegal River, from the French Ardennes to the mountains of the Western Sahara. What they have in common is that they lead us to meet the sleepers. Men and women moving between two worlds, that of the absent and that of the living, between two states, that of waking and that of sleep. In each of these stories lies a mystery free from all belief, all philosophy, all attempts at explanation. A mystery capable of reenchanting reality.  

“Le cercle des noyés” (The circle of the drowned men) is the name given to a group of black political prisoners in Mauritania who were arrested in 1986 and incarcerated in the city of Oulata's former Colonial Fort. The documentary follows the subtle mental process of one of the ex-prisoners as he remembers his own story and that of his fellow prisoners. Like an echo, we see a series of images of the sites of their confinement – bare, stripped of all traces of this past.