Ombline, a 20-year-old woman, is sent to prison for three years after committing a violent assault on a police officer. Just when she has lost all hope for the future, she discovers that she is pregnant. The law allows her to rear her newborn for the first 18 months of its life, after which time the child must be given up and placed into state care. Ombline has no intention of surrendering her beloved little boy and is prepared to do anything to convince the authorities that she is capable of rearing the child after she has left prison. As her maternal instincts assert themselves, the young woman finds she has a cause worth fighting for, and an opportunity to rebuild her shattered life…

Irène is a beautiful girl working in Paris, she soon meets a manager and hopes a love story with him. But he tells a lie, so she falls in love with a house painter.

Ibrahim, a Kurdish refugee, is hired by a French health care mutual which repatriates the bodies of dead Africans to their countries of origin. The day following his employment, he attends his first body recovery in a Paris-area apartment. All of a sudden Ibrahim is plunged into a baffling universe that will make him a modern Charon, the ferryman who,in Greek mythology, carried the souls of the newly deceased to the world of the dead.