In the early 1950s, fifteen-year-old Cecilia has become unwillingly pregnant due to a sexual assault by the warden of the orphanage in which she grew up. To conceal the pregnancy, the orphanage decides that Cecilia is to give away her unborn child to Ida, who desperately wants to adopt, and who lives alone with her maid Alma in an old, isolated mansion. Cecilia is sent out to live at the mansion for the duration of her pregnancy and for a time the three women constitute an odd family, where they each find respite for their loneliness, sorrow and longing. But with the arrival of the baby, the harmonious circumstances suddenly change. 

Madame Ida is a story about longing for love and affection, and about the extreme measures to which we will go, to achieve it.