Posthumous tribute paid by actor Luc Bernard to his older brother, director Guy Gilles ( 1938 - 1996 ). Documentary composed of interviews with some of his brother's friends and some actors from his main films, excerpts of which we see.
A bistro counter will decide the fate of two women. The first, Marie, the owner of a cafe for forty years in a Breton village, wants to realize her dream and go to the city. The second, Joelle, wants to leave town for the countryside.
A mother, depressed since the birth of her twin daughters, sinks into alcoholism, but her eldest son decides to do everything to save his family.
Claude
After her gynecologist tells her that her current involuntary celibacy could result in her being unable to enjoy sex in the future, Eva begins to consider ways that she could take active steps to get some action going in that area. Unfortunately, none of the men she currently knows are interested in going to bed with her, including her business partner, who just might be sexually attracted to trees but certainly isn't to her. That being the case, it is particularly galling that he gets jealous at the very notion of her having sex with business clients. Eva discusses these issues (and a great deal more) with her similarly forty-ish gal-pals.
Emile
In 1929, Mr. Messier, owner of a small print shop in a village in Quebec became a widower, he lives with his two children, Rachel, 9 years old, and Gaëtan, 7 years old. In this closed universe and in the absence of their mother, a great complicity is established between the children.
Roufa (Abdel Kechiche) is an attractive young man, and that works out well for him because he is a practitioner of "bezness:" he's a sex-for-hire boy for the tourists who come to Tunisia. His girlfriend deeply resents his having sex with other women but doesn't seem much bothered that a rich German man he's been having sex with is hoping to sponsor him in Europe. She also has a hard time with his tendency to behave like any other Arab male around a woman, telling her how to take care of her business. As it turns out, she's got better sense than any of the men around her.
Ramon Casals
In 1939, Ramón was a young man, caught up in his Barcelona family's involvement on the Republic side in the brutal Spanish Civil War. He and his family fled into exile ahead of Franco's troops. Now it is many years later, and he has come back to see how his old homestead fared in the intervening years. The only person he can find who is able to remember those years clearly is his family's old butler Claudio.
Simón
Simon Foreman
Prague, 1920. Milena's father wants her to follow in his footsteps and be one of the first female doctors in Czechoslovakia, but she is determined to be a writer. She elopes to Vienna with the Jewish music critic Ernst Pollak, and starts a correspondence with Franz Kafka. She leaves Pollak and returns to Prague with her father, where she befriends and translates Kafka. As a journalist, Milena covers the 1923 Ruhr worker's strike and meets the communist architect Jaromir.
In this melodrama, a woman whose husband has begun seeing a wholly unsuitable woman runs away and attempts to support her son and herself by doing construction work. Many years later, after the death of his mother, the boy makes his father's acquaintance once again.
Two would be producers launch a singer's career.
Pierre Blaudelle
A quiet painter, separated from his wife for a year, receives a suitcase in the mail from his mother, whom he hasn't seen since infancy. He believes she abandoned him to his wealthy, paternal grandparents. The suitcase contains mementos and a diary, a long letter to him, written over the years, with details of her youth, her first job as a pianist at a cinema, the coming of talkies, her marriage, and how he came to live with his grandparents. As he reads through the materials and her story comes to life, his son Antoine, who's about 10 or 12, tries to break through his father's silence and sorrow by taking matters into his own hands.
Antoine
Adolescents or young adults, Franck, Christine and the others meet, bond, leave each other. But the drama lurks.
Patrick
Robert is an architect and artist, in Vichy after separating from his Parisian wife. Robert finds it calms him to stand in the shadows of the home of Juliette and Patrick and watch her cook. She thinks he's a prowler and confronts him, then invites him in...
Alexandre Ragueneau
Francois Marboni is a butcher who is being blackmailed for having an affair with the prostitute Rachel in this black comedy. He decides to hire a hit man when the blackmailer demands that he start cutting his profit margin to the bone. Francois soon becomes a target of the hitman he hired.
Writer
A young rock singer, Morgan, falls in love with the pretty Julie. But Dimitri, Julie's "ex", doesn't see it that way.
Karl
A prostitute, released from prison, tries to change her life, but a murderous slave organization, the Consortium, is determined to bring her back to the fold or kill her, which forces her to seek help from Liberty, an anti-Consortium group.
Antoine
Antoine leaves his new bride behind to go on a skiing excursion with his uncle up the mountain behind their village of Derborence. Nine weeks after an avalanche apparently buries them alive, Antoine returns home. Certain that his uncle has also survived, he resolves to go back up and look for him—leaving his now-pregnant wife behind once more.
Gégé
Fred is a gambler and deep in debt. He owes crime boss Victor a lot of money and the time to pay has come. He decides to take a massive risk to refund his debts and agrees to kill a man. Fred knows he has to pay his debt and that the only way to do it is to carry out the hit arranged by Victor.
Max
Max, who dreams of adventures, abandons his studies at 18 to become involved in the navy. He becomes the sailor 512.
Young Martin Gray
Polish Martin Gray recalls the Holocaust, New York prosperity, and losing his wife and family.
Jean Doit
To emerge from anonymity, a young man assumes responsibility for a crime he did not commit.
Luc
Reduced to poverty, a young man is taken in by a rich lady who asks him for some dangerous services in exchange.