Brendon Grimshaw walks away from a career as a newspaper editor in the 1960s and buys Moyenne Island, off the Seychelles coast, for ten thousand pounds. The film follows what he does with it over the next 36 years, working the land alongside his friend Rene Lafortune: clearing overgrowth, planting 16,000 trees by hand, and cutting 4.8 kilometers of nature paths across a piece of land most people would have left alone. Giant land tortoises arrive and breed until the island holds 109 of them, and the jungle that once covered a barren outcrop becomes dense enough to shelter birds found nowhere else in the archipelago. By the time the film catches up with the results, the island Grimshaw bought for a fraction of its worth is valued at 34 million Euros, though he never sells. The footage stays close to the physical work, the paths, the trees, the tortoises, rather than dwelling on sentiment, letting four decades of labor by two men on one small island speak for the scale of what sustained effort can build.