Back in her hometown after spending a year learning singing lessons in New York, the young Marseillaise Faïza dreams of becoming a singer. But she helps her parents who have financial difficulties. While becoming a cleaning lady, she meets Fred, a music manager.

Simple is 26 but he has the intellectual abilities of a three year old. Simple is handicapped. Since the death of his father, he lives with his mother and his younger brother Kléber. But when their mother dies in a car accident, the brothers are left to their own devices. Kléber is going to take his big brother under his wing, but for the two young brothers life is not a chimera.

A French family plans to swap homes with a Turkish family for the holidays - but things do not go as planned.

A few miles from Paris, on the other side of the northern ring road, stands a ghetto neighborhood with countless rows of dilapidated apartment buildings, their concrete crumbling and iron rusting. A multiracial community has long been rooted here, while most native French families have deserted the area. In tower 216 lives a "model" family of Algerian origin, the Bouamazzas. Our heroine, Aïcha, 25, the eldest daughter, is held up as an example by the whole community. But Aïcha can no longer bear the weight of the community: she wants to spread her wings, gain her independence, and finally cross the Rubicon.

Rid of her rival Gloria, Aïcha will do everything to make her boss proud, with Ginette's help. Patrick presents her with a love ultimatum: their mothers must meet. And to top it off, things are getting worse in the neighborhood.

Five old friends decide to move in together as an alternative to living in a retirement home. Joining them is an ethnology student whose thesis is on the aging population.

Lisa, a mother of two, is gradually being consumed by her alcoholism while her husband Vincent is busy with his career and underestimates the gravity of the situation, simply avoiding the subject.