Vitalina Varela, a 55-year-old woman from Cape Verde, arrives in Lisbon three days after the funeral of her long-estranged husband, Joaquim, to collect his effects. He had left their homeland 25 years earlier to work in Portugal.

She meets with his friends and goes through his paltry belongings, and begins to realize that the man she longed for over the course of all those years was just a failure and a womanizing loser.