Helen, Rose and Lili have survived the Holocaust and have never seen each other since the war has ended. In 1960, they meet again in Berck, France. They learn to enjoy together simple pleasures in life: nice meals, ballads on the beach, playing in the waves.

Suffering from empty nest syndrome, two lonely parents concoct a scheme to get their kids interested in them again: they pretend they've won the lottery.

Eva is a Jewish literature teacher at a high school in Bordeaux, France, after the Second World War. During the war her whole family was sent to the German extermination camps by French collaborators. Eva survived by chance. Then by chance a new girl enters her class, a girl who resembles Eva's dead daughter.

Isabelle teaches, Bruno steals. Together, they start believing that could be happy. The day when the police net starts tightening, Bruno fleesm taking Isabelle with him. Deep within the forest, they hide and love each other, outside of time, in a final attempt to hold at bay the world's violence.

Michel suffers from a strange pathology. A perfectly old-fashioned and rare type of racism: the hatred of Englishmen. This obsessional fault, led him to create an association (which the only members are, except himself, his brother and a friend) and to lead commando operations (covering of English terms with stickers, and street hawking of a violently anti-British review).

Robert d'Eglantine invites his friends to spend a few days in an old country house where he proposes them to embark on a daring adventure with a surprising destination.

Male nurse in a psychiatric hospital, Joachim, twenty, is on the point of leaving work to celebrate New Year`s Eve with his family. His patients, have decided to celebrate the passage of the New Year joyfully, and are not ready to let him leave. The night will be comical for Joachim, very quickly exeeded by the events. But madness is not always where one may think.

In the middle of the 17th century, the Marquise de Sévigné wanted to make her daughter a brilliant and independent woman in her own image. But the more she tries to control the young woman's destiny, the more she alienates her. Mother and daughter then experience the throes of a singular and devastating passion. A major work of French literature is born from this devastation.