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.

The children of a small European mountain village end up being its only residents, soon after the adults cannot take their behavior any longer.

The story takes us from the dear Garrigue to the secondary school where Marcel is first ill at ease because he is a scholarship holder and because he went to the grade school (the other bourgeois pupils had probably a private tutor). A fight against a rich kid ,that augurs badly for what is to follow. (to be followed in "Le Temps des Amours" )