Part-time model Valentine unexpectedly befriends a retired judge after she runs over his dog. At first, the grumpy man shows no concern about the dog, and Valentine decides to keep it. But the two form a bond when she returns to his house and catches him listening to his neighbors’ phone calls.

Tatum, a young man in his forties suffering from a deep depression, is hired as a museum guard. Tasked with looking after a sculpture that exerts a mysterious fascination on the public, he gradually falls under its spell himself. He protects it as if his very existence depended on it, at the risk of losing touch with reality.

It's the first time Adrien is entering a homosexual sauna. In the space of one night, he discovers this microcosm where the comic aspect of the individual tragedies encounters the passing of time and where hope mingles with melancholy.

Sophie investigates the death of her sister who disappeared while taking pictures in the mountains with Bastien, a rather taciturn guide accused of being a dangerous criminal.

For twenty-four hours, Geneva becomes the living backdrop for a contemporary drama: by day, a place where life is good; by night, a refuge for the marginalized. Five characters will meet there, connected by the night shift of a pair of cops. Hans, a police officer nearing the end of his career and worn down by life, tries his hand at compassion, while Dan, his young partner, struggles between prejudice and discovering the other.

Henry Dunant, son of a Geneva francophone upper class bourgeoisie family, works for a Swiss exploitation company in French Algeria; when the colonists are thirsty, he returns determined to convince the firm and emperor Napoleon III to build a dam for them. After his Uncle, Dr. Hubert Dunant, diagnoses him not with Algerian typhus, just malaria, also his first meeting -dropping drawers in hospital for a shot- with nurse Cécile Thuillier, and meeting his careerist brother Daniel's fiancée, Léonie Bourg-Thibourg, daughter of the firm's boss, the board approves his plan. On his way to the emperor, who didn't even concede to receive him, Henry gets stuck in Castiglione, part of the Austrian province Lombardy which French troops came to 'liberate'; his Geneva friend Dr. Louis Appia saves his life by presenting him to suspicious Austrian troops as his medical assistant...