By early 2003, Ivory Coast has slid from West Africa's model economy toward civil war, and journalist William Wallis travels through the country to trace how it got there. The film follows a man hiding his face in a hovel after pro-government militia bulldozed his town, one of millions displaced by the unrest, and sets his story against the wider collapse: the World Bank forced the government to stop buying and selling the cocoa crop, farmers were left exposed to volatile international prices, and unemployment now runs at roughly two-thirds. That economic wreckage feeds directly into the country's north-south divide, where the Christian south has used nationality laws to keep Muslim northerners and long-settled immigrant communities from voting or gaining power. Rebel commander Cherif Ousman states plainly that his fighters will take on government helicopters and tanks with stones and knives if it comes to that. Wallis interviews people on both sides of the fracture, building a picture of a country where recession and identity politics have become impossible to separate.