This is a portrait of a man and of a country, as he travels through it. He is a travelling salesman, and travels through Switzerland selling cosmetics to beauty parlors.

After his father's death in prison, a man hopes to start a new life with his pregnant wife.

At the age of 75, Gabriel Pitteloud is one of the few chimney masons who create handcrafted fireplaces in cut stones. For the man who, for 40 years, has been making the stones sing, the profession has distilled into a philosophy of life.

"I did the takes for this film in the fall of 1966 and in the summer of 1967. I came to know and love the 'old woman' who gave her 'face' in one of the city-run dining halls in Zurich to the first part of the film. I was looking for poets for the film 'Robert Walser' and was hoping to find one in one of the places Robert Walser used to go to decades before, but it proved to be a complete failure. The woman who gave her 'face' attracted my attention because she bad something radiant about her and, despite her advanced age, still had a roguish way of looking at the world. She must have seen me several times before during test takes, because she told me later that she had seen me getting thrown out ('Filming not permitted') and that this had happened at another city-run dining hall. Because the woman appealed to me so much, I asked her on the spur of the moment if she would be willing to let herself be filmed, even though I did not actually know what I wanted to film." (HHK)

Career criminals vie for ownership of a disreputable waterfront dive and for the love of the cabaret-gal that sings there.

A young woman is walking through the city. She meets a friend at a coffee shop. This friend tells her every detail about how she bought a bike the day before. The young woman listens.

A nighttime odyssey just before New Year's Eve: a woman and a man walking along a back road, caught up in a fight. Their conflict spreads out around them: it covers the dirty coat the woman is wearing, a child she meets and a waiter who doesn't want to leave her alone. Between external stimuli and internal conditions an idiosyncratic and seemingly inescapable space of repressed aggression and confrontation emerges.

Nadine and Janine share a flat together with their friends Mark and Andreas. The flat share is a universe with its own rules, languages, manners and relationships. A stimulating place, where chaos is floating through corridors and rooms. Pending over everything is the approaching breakup of the community, which becomes more and more perceptible within short moments of silence. One of the flatmates, Janine, is going to leave. Janine's farewell party affects each of her friends in a different way. A precise description of a fragile structure breaking apart.

Alexandra is spending the weekend at her parents' house. As she arrives at the familiar apartment, nobody's home. Yet successively, the mother, a friend of the family and the father get in. The rooms, which were quite in the beginning, slowly fill up with noises, conversations and activity. Alexandra withdraws from the social world of the family structure repeatedly. Finally, the mother, the father and the friend go to the movies together. Alexandra is left behind by herself.

The stark personality differences between sisters Karen and Jule become apparent as their families come together for a birthday party.