Catherine, a concert pianist, is surprised one night by the arrival of her best friend from childhood, Marie-Alexandrine (Max), whom she hasn't seen for 25 years. Catherine and Max were Québec's most promising young pianists in the mid-1960's when the adventurous Max gets pregnant. She wants to keep the child, but her mother forces her to give him up for adoption; afterwards, Max leaves Québec and music. Now, years later, she returns, obsessed with finding her son. She locates the adoption records, and social services contacts her son to ask if he wants to see her. He refuses, but she keeps trying. Is a relationship with him possible? And what about her musical talent?

A young French Canadian, one of five boys in a conservative family in the 1960s and 1970s, struggles to reconcile his emerging identity with his father's values.

In the year 1873, a Japanese woman is sold as a mistress to an American diplomat stationed in Japan.

At a Montreal railway station, passengers are stranded because of a snowstorm. One of the stranded, Pierre-Paul, discovers a young schoolgirl on the brink of suicide. While he searches for someone to intervene, Chili, the young girl, disappears, only to reappear of her own accord after Pierre-Paul's fruitless search. This brief encounter leads to flashback revelations and interaction among the supporting characters also stranded in the storm.

Louis Jobin is an ordinary young man from Montreal who sells televisions at an electronics store. He wins a contest sponsored by the local cable company in which the first prize is that he'll be followed non-stop by a camera crew, with the footage broadcast live on Channel 19. Unfortunately, his ordinary life is so ordinary, despite the best efforts of his starstruck mother, that the producers attempt to spice things up behind his back.

The reality of addiction in a tough-minded docudrama set in the bleak milieu of hustlers and junkies in Montreal.