Billie Holiday spent much of her career being adored by fans. In the 1940s, the government targeted Holiday in a growing effort to racialize the war on drugs, ultimately aiming to stop her from singing her controversial ballad, "Strange Fruit."

William, a respected artist who lost everything after his divorce, arrives in Montreal on a job prospect. When the job falls through he then is saved and forms an erotic friendship and exposes his soul with a young woman named Paulette.

David Wozniak is a perpetual adolescent who discovers that, as a sperm donor, he has fathered 533 children. He is advised that more than 100 of his offspring are trying to force the fertility clinic to reveal the true identity of "Starbuck," the pseudonym he used when donating his sperm. To make matters worse, his girlfriend Valérie is pregnant with his child, but doesn't feel that he is mature enough to be a father.

On the eve of her final moments, a woman recalls her alcoholic past. She revisits her entire youth, including a binge that, at 46, cost her everything she had: "Loneliness and aging are themes that impose themselves on me, in one form or another. As for alcoholism, it fascinates me because of the revolt it underpins, and revolts me because of the unhappiness it creates around itself.

In the 1950s, young boys were placed in orphanages and endure harsh and austere living conditions. As a united group, they supported each other and survived despite bullying, hardship and little hope for better days. While these children were doing their best to survive, they had no way to suspect the secret dealings between the clergy, the medical profession and the government that will inevitably seal their fates. The institution faced with a precarious financial situation, the solution is to transform the orphanage into a psychiatric institute in order to obtain additional subsidies. To demonstrate the need for this change in status, the orphans are labeled as insane by the very people who took them in to help them. While their future as orphans was already precarious, they become prisoners of an asylum system from which they have little hope of being able to free themselves even as they grow older.