Francis Girod adapted L'Etat sauvage from Georges Conchon's award-winning novel. In the 1960s, a handful of Europeans are adrift in a young African nation struggling to create its own identity after gaining independence from colonial rule. A black Minister of Health in the new government lives with a white Frenchwoman-who has left both her bureaucrat husband and the adventurer with whom she fled to Africa. Their relationship is despised by all. When the husband, now with UNESCO, is sent to this (mythical) African nation, his very tolerance of the interracial affair causes tensions to escalate.