Remi is struggling to get by and has had enough. That's it: he's going to enlist. The problem is that he hasn't the courage to tell his four best friends.

Beirut, Lebanon. Hassan is assembling wooden boards. His wife is dead. He is building her coffin. Tamara and Rami, the children, in their twenties, are helping him as best they can to fulfill her last wish: to be buried in her childhood village, abandoned for more than 20 years.

Beirut after the war. In a house from a time gone by, a mother listens to a letter from her son, a sniper, who tells her the detailed story of his killings without showing the slightest remorse.

Patrick Perrault, a photo-journalist covering the war in Beirut in the late 1980s, is himself caught up in the hostilities when one day he is picked up and bundled into a car at gun-point. Blind-folded, he is taken to an unknown location where he discovers that he is being taken hostage by Lebanese guerrillas.