A 14th-century peasant becomes transfixed by a statue of the Virgin Mary, and petitions to be walled into a cell attached to the church as a religious hermit.

Michel is a Belgian inventor. He cares for his father, a paralysed writer, is married to a Congolese woman and is the father of an interracial child whom he reassures as to his parentage. He discovers at the age of 41 that he was adopted, actually having been born in Sainte-Cécile, Quebec. In the summer of 2000, he travels to Quebec, supposedly to sell some of his inventions. While on a near-impossible quest to find his birth family in the town where he was born, he crosses paths with Louis Legros, son of another inventor, in a meeting which will change their lives.

François, a Jewish lad, works for an insurance company and is engaged to a Jewish girl. His world is very ordered and secure and perhaps feels a bit claustrophobic. When he observes that a murderer has been declared psychologically incompetent and is to be placed in a mental institution, probably for the rest of his life, François feels the murder's plight very keenly. As time goes by, the murderer's situation is more and more unbearable to him, and he breaks off his engagement. Afterward, he has a liaison with a girl he has not known before, an act that somehow frees him. Now he wants to free the murderer somehow.

Two young men have left their obscure Balkan country to earn some money as "guest workers" in western Europe. On their way back home, they attempt to change trains in Paris but encounter surprising difficulties from the ticket authorities there. It seems that political changes have rendered their homeland nonexistent, and their passports are no good. Before long, they are stranded in Paris without passports, without a country, and soon even their luggage is stolen. Their fumbling efforts to straighten out the mess result in the French press getting into the act, labeling them as Russian spies. The Parisian expatriate community takes them into its bosom, and romance blooms between one of the lads and a Spanish hatmaker, before they finally achieve a (highly improbable) solution for their difficulties.

Maria Garcia (Carmen Maura) is a television journalist and she's about to be a single mother. Her career foremost in her mind, she doesn't slow down even for a minute, despite her pregnancy. She is, however, taking Lamaze classes and is quite competently coping with the romantic attentions of a man she's not very interested in. It's not at all irrelevant that her news beat includes stories on terrorism, the greenhouse effect, pollution and genetic engineering, because when her baby's due date comes and goes, she starts hearing from her infant from in the womb. It is telling her that it and many other babies are refusing to be born into such a horrible world. She learns that this is true, and that the children born through induced labor are dying.

Coming from the London bourgeoisie, the Nosferat (this time, with the vampire taking on the role of the famous serial killer who raged in the London district of Whitechapel in 1888), reforms bourgeois morality by reducing its puritanical contradictions. He executes prostitutes “in the name of Virtue, Morality and order”, as a result of a repressive education he received, especially on the sexual level...