An anthology of eleven vignettes featuring star-studded casts of extremely unique individuals who all share the common activities of conversing while drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
The life of a Russian physician and poet who, although married to another, falls in love with a political activist's wife and experiences hardship during World War I and then the October Revolution.
A charming psychopath tries to coerce a tennis star into his theory that two strangers can commit the perfect crime by exchanging murders—each killing the other’s most-hated person.
In the late 1940s, a murderous couple known as the 'The Lonely Hearts Killers' kills close to a dozen people. Two detectives try to nab the duo who find their targets via the personals in the paper.
During China's Tang dynasty the emperor has taken the princess of a neighboring province as his wife. She has borne him two sons and raised his eldest. Now his control over his dominion is complete, including the royal family itself.
Leonard is an English tailor who used to craft suits on London’s world-famous Savile Row. After a personal tragedy, he’s ended up in Chicago, operating a small tailor shop in a rough part of town where he makes beautiful clothes for the only people around who can afford them: a family of vicious gangsters.
After a failed relationship, a deadbeat man tries to live off the land in a beach town on Long Island.
Richthofen goes off to war like thousands of other men. As fighter pilots, they become cult heroes for the soldiers on the battlefields. Marked by sportsmanlike conduct, technical exactitude and knightly propriety, they have their own code of honour. Before long he begins to understand that his hero status is deceptive. His love for Kate, a nurse, opens his eyes to the brutality of war.
Terry is a small-time car dealer trying to leave his shady past behind and start a family. Martine is a beautiful model from Terry's old neighbourhood who knows that Terry is no angel. When Martine proposes a foolproof plan to rob a bank, Terry recognises the danger but realises this may be the opportunity of a lifetime.
After she discovers that her boyfriend has betrayed her, Hilary O'Neil is looking for a new start and a new job. She begins to work as a private nurse for a young man suffering from blood cancer. Slowly, they fall in love, but they always know their love cannot last because he is destined to die.
Young nurse Sissi lives a secluded life entirely devoted to her patients at Birkenhof asylum. Her first encounter with ex-soldier and drifter Bodo has a lasting impact. He causes an accident in which he provides first aid, Sissi wonders if he may be the man of her dreams. But when she finds him weeks later she is rejected, as Bodo is stuck somewhere between a traumatic past and a criminal future.
A hostile Chinese nurse (Yamaguchi) who works in an orphanage is won over by the care and commitment of the Japanese doctor (Sano) who treats her wards. Disease outbreaks and family obligations, however, threaten to torpedo their budding romance.
Rawang, an immigrant from Bangladesh living in awful conditions, takes pity on a Chinese man, Hsiao-kang, who is beaten up and left in the street. Rawang lovingly nurses him on a mattress he found. When he is almost healed, Hsiao-kang meets the waitress Chyi. His love for Rawang is put to the test.
Marc, an unexperienced medical doctor from Germany arrives at the Hospital Universitario del Valle in Cali, Colombia for his internship and soon finds himself in-between a raging gang war in Siloé, a Cali barrio. In the hospital he has to care mostly for shotgun wounds, while in the streets he falls in love with a stall-holder who cares for some of the children involved in drug trafficking and criminal violence. Alienating his colleagues and his host family while befriending the kids, he soon finds himself trapped in the center of the violent conflict between the gangs and has to come to a decision.
The story takes place in 1917. Véronique is a young woman of 35 years, nurse at the military hospital of Besançon. She suddenly learns of the murder of her husband, the mysterious Count Vorski, whom she has not seen for fourteen years. Her research will also lead her to the track of her father and son whom she believed to have died in a shipwreck, already a long time ago. From clue to clue, here we are in Brittany, on this island with a name so ill-fitting... Brutal deaths, enigmatic words written... by whom? A frightening prophecy, the superstitious terror of the island's inhabitants, and suddenly, Veronica d'Hergemont can no longer leave this island. She's stuck alone. Almost alone...
At fifty, René Maugras has lost everything. This wealthy press boss fell into a coma and was rushed to hospital. He has since emerged from his worrying state of health but remains unable to move and communicate. He must also begin rehabilitation, which turns out to be particularly humiliating. Fortunately for him there is Blanche, his nurse, who surrounds him with affection. Blanche takes her case to heart.
When an elderly man and his caretaker plant a sapling, a ghost of long-forgotten grief stirs. As the silence deepens between them, what’s left unspoken threatens to shatter the peace.
Iris is a shy and dowdy young woman stuck in a dead-end job at a match factory, who dreams of finding love at the local dancehall. Finding herself pregnant after a one-night stand and abandoned by the father, Iris finally decides the time has come to get even and she begins to plot her revenge.
A new virus (a.k.a “fantomal virus”) is transmitted to a small rural village. Dasol, a three-month nurse working in the village hospital, is being workplace bullying (a.k.a “burned”). In the meantime, Dasol begins to educate a new nurse Eunbi earlier than expected due to the poor ward situation.
As the city of Paris and the French people grow in consumer culture, a housewife living in a high-rise apartment with her husband and two children takes to prostitution to help pay the bills.