The film is based on a novel by Anna Gavalda, and adapted for the small screen by M. Langlois and Veronique Lecharpy. The idea that a formal academic school program is traditionally seen as the way for young minds to be formed and molded, yet how many children that are deemed failures by the same system go on to make names for themselves as they discover fields and subjects not taught by the educational establishment world-wide.

Alice learns of her mother's accidental death while travelling in Canada. The body has been repatriated to France at the request of her husband, Alice's father. But he has supposedly been dead for 22 years. Is it really her father? Why would her mother have lied to her?