This is an important day for Marc Chanois, an insurance advisor heading toward middle age: it's his fiancée Sabine's birthday, her parents arrive in Paris and Marc will meet them for dinner to announce the engagement (her father can't stand him), he's bought Sabine a Spitfire, and his most important client is to sign a policy. But, as the day wears on, he's vexed by an incompetent secretary, the unexpected return of a girlfriend he hasn't seen in five years, squatters who use his office at night, the jealous former lover of a flight attendant who lives in the building, and his boss's unexpected return from a Swiss clinic. Will he reach Sabine in one piece?

Othilie spends her vacations with her uncle Antoine, an old lonesome bear. In charge of a regional park, Antoine lives a long way from Paris, in company of the shepherd Tambourin, whose frightening face hides the innocence of a new-born child. Since the arrival of Othilie, odd things happen. A slaughtered sheep is found and weird howls are sounding through the night. The wolves are not far away.

Follows the lives of three families who live in a three-story building in a Roman neighbourhood.

Set in Genoa, the film concerns the financial struggles and emotional strain that occur after Michele loses his job. He and his wife Elsa are forced to give up their affluent lifestyle and cope with the tensions of moving into a smaller home, finding new work, and making sacrifices.

In Valais, during the 1950s, cowherds are confronted with an epidemic raging in the Sasseneire mountain pasture. Joseph, who wants to marry Victorine, wants to take his animals there despite the place's bad reputation. Barthélemy claims that an evil curse is responsible for the death of the cows. The mountain pastures are soon quarantined. Clou, who is innocent, is cruelly locked up.

In 1968, engineer Giorgio Rosa established the independent state called "The Isle of Roses" off the coast of Rimini, built on a platform outside the territorial waters, with Esperanto as the official language. The Italian authorities did not take it well because the micronation was seen as an expedient to not pay taxes on the revenues obtained thanks to the arrival of numerous tourists and curious people.

An old film director, unhappy with the movie he's shooting about a Hungarian circus stranded in Rome during the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising, faces divorce from his producer wife and other problems.

You're 20 years old and life is full of endless possibilities. But, on a rainy evening, you bumps into another car and life hasn't been the same anymore. Even though you have everything something keeps on eating you up.

Set amid the European community in an unspecified North African country, a colony on the verge of nationalism just before the war. And colonized is what happens to a French diplomat, Julien Rochelle, when he meets the mysterious beauty Clothilde de Watteville. Schmid 's favorite axiom, that love is projection, never had such a thorough airing. Is Clothilde really the wife of a French official now holed up in Siberia? Or is she Hecate, goddess of black magic and devourer of the Arab boys she meets far from the European quarter? Only our projections know for sure; for the rest, she is a "woman looking out into the night." Drawn from a novel by Paul Morand, who based the main character on his wife Helene, Schmid's film achieves an atmosphere of magic in which psychological credibility is not so much absent as irrelevant-a film that distances itself from the drama it invokes, perhaps as the elusive Clothilde turns her back on the madness she provokes.

In this "inside look" at French filmmaking, Marechal - who is a has-been director - a producer, Vito Catene and Camile Dor, a big-name actress, have agreed to make a film about drugs, but don't have a story, financing, or any of the other elements needed to make it. This doesn't stop them; they cobble together the financing and begin shooting anyway. The producer is very fond of the leading actress, and when she gets hooked on drugs for real in the course of shooting what he feels to be a farcical imitation of a film, he gives up his shares in the film and heads off for the back of beyond (Zanzibar) to lick his wounds. To add insult to injury, the film winds up being a critical and commercial success.