It’s 1922 in the Quebec countryside, and Claudine Perreault has big plans for her son, François. He’ll enter the pries- thood so that God will forgive her for bearing a child out of wedlock. But 17-year-old François is dead set against joining the seminary. Enraged, Claudine strikes him so violently he goes deaf. After his mother’s death, François begins a different kind of relationship with a woman when he buys the wild and aloof young Amica from an Innu pedlar.