In the post Spanish civil war years, Catalan kids would sit in circles among the ruins and tell stories, known as "aventis" (the film's original title in Catalan, its original language). These tales mix war stories, local gossip, comic book characters, fantasy and real events. The "aventis" told in this film are told in flashback. In the mid 80s, 45 or so years after the age of the "aventis," a doctor and a nurse-nun (who grew up together, and now are co-workers in a hospital) identify the corpse of one of the main characters of the "aventis" of their childhood and adolescence. Besides the interesting flashbacks - a chronical of the Civil War in a "typical" Barcelona microcosm itself, the discovery of this body (belonging to someone long presumed dead) leads to other surprises and unresolved doubts, several decades later

Paco, the teenage son of a Civil Guard commander in Basque Country, becomes addicted to heroin.

A fierce passion grows between a well-known actress and a gypsy, from whom she seeks advice about her role in a new version of Pygmalion.

1939: The remains of the Spanish Republican Army crossed the French border. Among the exiles are Lluís Companys, President of the Generalitat de Catalunya, and also Aguirre, President of the Basque Government. After the invasion of France by Nazi troops, Companys will be arrested by the Gestapo and handed over to the Francoist authorities. Led by the Count of Mayalde, he is transferred to Madrid and later to Barcelona. After a summary trial, Companys is condemned to death and shot.

A bank robbery goes wrong. The robbers, two of them unemployed family men, take two hostages, one of them needing heart medication, and leave them in an apartment, tied to a bomb. The police has to find the apartment before the bomb explodes. At the same time, in the same house, two old men are solving a jigsaw puzzle, and a female cellist practices the Bach cello suites.

Two lovers, a man and a woman, meet and separate in a timeless space.