A woman describes the city of Alexandria, saying "Il n'y a plus rien" ("there is nothing left"). The sentence turns into a refrain, addressing the difficulty in exploring the past and seeing the present, in a city built precariously upon shifting strata of erasure, disappearance and forgetting. Two sequences of slides unfold between a curtain and mirrors: the first follows the production of cotton grown in Alexandria in the first half of the century and ending at the now-shut cotton mills in Lancashire, England; the second is an individual story of departure from Egypt, thus forecasting the massive emigration to take place a few decades later. The multiple projections and reflections reconnect these two, intimately related movements.