The film is about the relations between the inhabitants of Russia and the Caucasus, and about their influence on each other. Young Georgian Georgi Iobadze tells the audience the story of the Vainakhs (a group of peoples of the North Caucasus and Georgia) in the period from 1813 to 1913.

A talk show

June 1946: Stalin invites Russian emigres to return to the motherland. It's a trap: when a ship-load from France arrives in Odessa, only a physician and his family are spared execution or prison. He and his French wife (her passport ripped up) are sent to Kiev. She wants to return to France immediately; he knows that they are captives and must watch every step.

Fred (Vincent Lindon) is a former crane driver who was a victim of the closure of his factory. He takes care of the little boy of his girlfriend (Clotilde Courau), does the housework and sometimes goes to the job center but boredom is inescapable. One day, because he accepted to drive a truck for a friend to a warehouse, he's caught up in a vicious spiral that goes beyond him. It's all the more serious as shady men want to eliminate him an the police is on his back.

The young artist Burtsev goes to Paris about the inheritance left to him by his uncle, who left for France with the first wave of emigrants. There, he is expected by the hostility of some persons interested in the inheritance, and the open sympathies of others - the old man Yerikhonov and his daughter Asya, who fell in love with Burtsev.