A couple's impasse is refracted through the world’s great tragedies, and the news of "what is happening in Kosovo”. A tender, indifferent, cynical and bittersweet slice of melodrama.

Set in a rural Québec village in the dead of winter, Jean-François, a single father, works at a deserted bowling alley at night and in a rundown motel during the day. His daughter, Julyvonne, never leaves their home. Jean-François isolates her in fear that contact with the outside world will scar her the way it has him.

Michel is a Belgian inventor. He cares for his father, a paralysed writer, is married to a Congolese woman and is the father of an interracial child whom he reassures as to his parentage. He discovers at the age of 41 that he was adopted, actually having been born in Sainte-Cécile, Quebec. In the summer of 2000, he travels to Quebec, supposedly to sell some of his inventions. While on a near-impossible quest to find his birth family in the town where he was born, he crosses paths with Louis Legros, son of another inventor, in a meeting which will change their lives.

An emotionally immature underwater photographer returns home to an affair with his best friend's deaf girlfriend and unresolved issues with the wife he left six months before.