Confined to his Tahitian hut by the French colonial authorities in 1903, the painter Paul Gauguin is forced to paint a new masterpiece to save his five-year-old native son, while battling illness and torn between madness and sanity. In the course of these events, memories of the past, especially of his life and work at the Panama Canal, the place where his artistic career began and his guilt at abandoning his family in Paris, begin to haunt him.