The lives of a French theater director, her ex-boyfriend, and the two actors playing them intersect dramatically.

Alessandro teaches musicology at the university of Strasbourg. He is also a volunteer reader in hospitals. He shares his apartment with his daughter, 15-year-old Irina, and his anarchist brother Luigi. Life is not always rosy at Alessandro's for three main reasons : he is a widower and has never really recovered from the death of his young wife ; his brother is some kind of parasite who refuses to sell his paintings to capitalist speculators and so to contribute to the cost of the household ; Irina, whom he has raised alone since she was five months old and always felt close to, is rapidly changing from little girl to teenager and wishes to be treated as such. One day, Florence, a beautiful young woman, gets into Alessandro's life. Will he eventually take his chances with her? And will he manage to stop stifling Irina? And will he finally get on with Luigi?

September 1960: on a purely punitive basis, eight scouts must climb the solid mass of Brévent to 2500 meters of altitude. The so beautiful and so majestic mountain which draws up face them very quickly reveals dangerous. All the techniques of orientation learned at the scouts will do nothing there. The teenagers find themselves delivered to themselves. Lost in the abrupt throats, the eight boys are confronted cold, with the hunger and the fear.

In 1924, female workers in a sardine cannery in Brittany went on strike.