After Paula's suicide, her best friend, Ana, recalls the circumstances that united both women in the past and how they lived a close relationship that could have become more than just a friendship if social conventions had not prevented it.

Kingdom of Hawaii, 1866. Fearful that leprosy would spread throughout the archipelago, the king banishes the sick to the island of Molokai. In 1873, the Belgian Catholic missionary Damien de Veuster arrives on the island to help improve the lives of its unfortunate inhabitants.