In antique Rome, a simple pepboy for chars becomes involved in a coup against Cesar. Rahatlocum is a North African Roman colony where Julius Caesar came to spend an expensive holiday. The revolt rumbles among the small people who find a leader in the person of Ben-Hur Marcel.

This character study of a French patriot during the Nazi Occupation has comedian Noel as the chief of the underground who uses his hobby of growing orchids to hide his radio equipment.

Returning from South America, a singer is hired by an old pal who runs a detective agency to use a perch as a night club performer to be an investigator.The amateur sleuth then falls for a girl whose brother is a jewel thief.

Six people travel by overnight train from Marseilles to Paris. When they arrive, one of them, a young woman, is found dead in a sleeping berth. The police, led by Inspector Grazzi, investigate the other five passengers, suspecting that one among them was responsible. However, as the investigation is stepped up, the others start turning up dead. It's up to the remaining two to solve the case, lest they become the next victims.

A traveller who has lost his passport in a Paris airport while between flights is restricted to a special transit zone. There he finds a group of similarly lost people hiding out and living from hand-to-mouth, reliant on their ingenuity to survive.

The year 1975 is declared “year of the woman”. On this occasion Bernard Pivot invited Françoise Giroud on television, then Secretary of State for Women. Faced with statements, a group of women filmmakers parody the issues in a provocative way.

Abbé Pellegrin, parish priest of Sableuse, sells an ancient Christ to an unknown man, M. de Saint Preux. Summoned to the bishop's palace, he learns that he has been the victim of a swindler. The Christ, exchanged for a "mouthful of bread", is a valuable antique. Not wanting to compromise his wartime comrade La Goupille, who had introduced him to Saint Preux, Pellegrin proposed to his bishop that he himself carry out the search for the Christ. For the occasion, he swapped his cassock for a "civilian" outfit and landed in Paris. He recovers the treasure in the midst of a series of adventures and misadventures involving Cousinet, the former squire of Sableuse. He takes in the tenants Cousinet has just evicted from his hotel.

Delphine Seyrig plays a middle-aged woman coping with an ungovernable present and holding out hopes of escaping to a more pleasant past. She leaves her current residence to retreat to her provincial French hometown. Here she dreams of locating and rekindling an old love. Seyrig is less inscrutable here than in her debut feature-film appearance Last Year in Marienbad (61), though the character is just as complex and difficult to please. Grain of Sand was released in France in 1983 as Le Grain de Sable.

A prominent politician is murdered during a demonstration. The government and army are trying to suppress the truth, but a tenacious magistrate is determined to not to let them get away with it.

Camille, Dov and Joëlle live on the edge of society and are involved in petty theft helping them to buy their drug doses and to survive as best they can. One day, while attempting to rob a movie theater, they activate the alarm signal and it is Pierre, Camille's brother, who is doing a heist in the same building, who is arrested red-handed. The three young people decide to kidnap a police officer and exchange him for Pierre.