Bill Baker, an American oil-rig roughneck from Oklahoma, travels to Marseille to visit his estranged daughter, Allison, who is in prison for a murder she claims she did not commit. Confronted with language barriers, cultural differences, and a complicated legal system, Bill builds a new life for himself in France as he makes it his personal mission to exonerate his daughter.
Eight very different couples deal with their love lives in various loosely interrelated tales all set during a frantic month before Christmas in London.
Caye is a young prostitute whose family is unaware of her profession. She meets her striking Dominican neighbour Zulema, an illegal immigrant, after she finds her in the bathroom, badly beaten up. They strike up a close friendship unbeknownst to Caye's xenophobic co-workers.
Frustrated, because he is forced to produce bad TV-shows, a manager of a TV-station, enters the station and manipulates the ratings, to initiate a TV-revolution.
"Popeye" Doyle travels to Marseilles to find Alain Charnier, the drug smuggler that eluded him in New York.
Edmond Dantés's life and plans to marry the beautiful Mercedes are shattered when his best friend, Fernand, deceives him. After spending 13 miserable years in prison, Dantés escapes with the help of a fellow inmate and plots his revenge, cleverly insinuating himself into the French nobility.
After his father is murdered by the Nazis in 1938, a young Viennese Jew named Ferry Tobler flees to Prague, where he joins forces with another expatriate and a sympathetic Czech relief worker. Together with other Jewish refugees, the three make their way to Paris, and, after spending time in a French prison camp, eventually escape to Marseille, from where they hope to sail to a safe port.
A Swiss nun falls in love with a Japanese engineer.
In southern France, a Franco-Arabic shipyard worker along with his partner's daughter pursues his dream of opening a restaurant.
A small-time thief steals a car and impulsively murders a motorcycle policeman. Wanted by the authorities, he attempts to persuade a girl to run away to Italy with him.
Three generations of women survive the east wind, fire, insanity, superstition and even death by means of goodness, lies and boundless vitality.
Benjamin is meant to be a great doctor, he’s certain of it. But his first experience as a junior doctor in the hospital ward where his father works doesn’t turn out the way he hoped it would. Responsibility is overwhelming, his father is all but present, and his co-junior partner, a foreign doctor, is far more experimented than he is. This internship will force Benjamin to confront his limits… and start his way to adulthood.
Paris, 1984. A group of friends contend with the first outbreak of the AIDS epidemic.
Caesar and his apes are forced into a deadly conflict with an army of humans led by a ruthless Colonel. After the apes suffer unimaginable losses, Caesar wrestles with his darker instincts and begins his own mythic quest to avenge his kind. As the journey finally brings them face to face, Caesar and the Colonel are pitted against each other in an epic battle that will determine the fate of both their species and the future of the planet.
In an attempt to flee Nazi-occupied France, Georg assumes the identity of a dead author but soon finds himself stuck in Marseilles, where he falls in love with Maria, a young woman searching for her missing husband.
The story of a small-town man who comes to make it big in the city, where he is almost instantly relieved of all his possessions. Homeless and penniless, he is taken in by a woman who looks after him.
A man wakes from a coma speaking a fully formed but unrecognizable language baffling linguistic experts from around the globe.
In Marseille, the young Serbian-Albanian Adria Shala is an illegal immigrant traumatized by her past. Every now and then Adria recalls her life in Kosovo, when she was saved from rape by a deserter called Srdjan Vasiljevic in 1999. They move to Belgrade where Srdjan becomes a gangster, dealing weapons and becoming an assassin. Adria learns how to shoot and helps Srdjan with his work at first, becoming his mistress later.
The story of the struggle of an autistic girl and her brother trying to survive without their parents.
A gangster escapes jail and quickly makes plans to continue his criminal ways elsewhere, but a determined inspector is closing in.