In Rwanda, 1973, on top of a hill near the Nile River, a select group of girls attends Notre-Dame du Nil, an elite Catholic boarding school run by Belgian nuns. Despite their uniforms, the hierarchy between the students is more pronounced than in typical high schools as tensions mount between the Hutus and Tutsis. Gloriosa, the daughter of a high government official, makes Tutsi students, friends Veronica and Virginia, her target. But when a European artist shows a special interest in the two minority girls, Gloriosa's jealousy deepens, exacerbating her rage and anti-Tutsi sentiment. Writer/director Atiq Rahimi evocatively adapts Scholastique Mukasonga’s acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel, bringing a boldly colorful aesthetic to this grim tale of the beginning of the rising ethnic tensions that led to the 1994 Rwandan genocide.