Johnny and Marianne are a young couple--maybe in love? Johnny messes with the wrong guy and is on the run.

Valerio Mastandrea is Franz, a night bus driver on the airport route who owes a lot of money from poker debts. He's stumbled upon by the variously named Leila, a thief who has accidentally become wrapped up in a secretive blackmail deal involving the President. As the film unfolds, a secret war between factions of the Security Services, a series of confusions among the various criminal fraternities whose activites have been touched upon by the deal, and Leila's past all complicate the situation.

USA, 1951. When a group of Italian immigrants suspected to have connections with the Mafia are sent back to Italy with the brand of "undesirable", a journalist decide to inquire about the story.

As a child, Sicilian Placido Rizzotto saw his father imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, and as a young man he fought in World War II, first as a soldier and then as an anti-fascist partisan. These events have left Placido with little taste for petty tyranny and with a desire to promote social justice. Upon his return home, he becomes increasingly aware that the Mafia has taken hold of his village, witnessing angry and frustrated as gangsters control local politics and take whatever they want from the people. Placido helps to form a trade union as a challenge to the Mafia's authority, and attempts to organize the villagers into a collective to grow crops in the fields taken by the Mafia.