Henri “Papillon” Charrière, a safecracker from the Parisian underworld, is wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony of French Guiana, where he forges a strong friendship with Louis Dega, a counterfeiter who needs his protection.
Imagine the prison of Alcatraz, only 10 times worse, built on tropical, hellish and deadly islands, lost to the rest of the world. Three tiny castaway islands rise away from the coast of French Guyana, in South America: The Devil's Islands. Now buried under an impenetrable jungle, lay the lost remains of what had been for a hundred years the most storied convict prison in history. There, while most of the prisoners faded into oblivion, a few became legends. Some because they were innocent, as in the scandalous Dreyfus Affair, some because they somehow escaped the islands of nightmare, as did the "butterfly", Henry Charrière, immortalized by Steve McQueen in Papillon. Now 50 years after the prison doors slammed shut for the last time, we explore what's left of the Devil's Islands' unbelievably dark and oppressive realm.
From Colorado, where he has chosen to live, Fouad Mennana begins to trace his late grandfather - Amara Mennana - an Algerian farmer expropriated from his land and deported to the prisons of French Guiana in 1926.
Vincent, a 20-year old geology student from Paris, goes to French Guyana to do an internship at a gold mining company. Taken under the wing of local gold lord Antoine Serra, Vincent quickly falls into the much more lucrative and dangerous world of gold trafficking. From Serra, who acts like a father to him, Vincent learns everything there is to know about the business. Newcomers aren't welcome - Louis, Serra's right hand, makes it clear that he does not trust him. Vincent and Serra start building a camp to explore a gold mine, but tensions rise to a full-fledged war between them and their Brazilian competitors. And things get even more complicated when Vincent discovers that the mythical Sarah Bernhard mine is not a legend. The Guyanese jungle is a world where businessmen, gangsters, geologists and soldiers collide, and men kill and are killed for a few grams of the precious metal.
