A group of 17 theater actors wonder about what happened to their teacher when he doesn't show up for a class.

In custody after she murders her middle aged photographer lover, a fourteen year old Pam reflects back on the bohemian life she spent with her mother Lily, a free spirited cabaret performer. Lily tried to elevate her stripper performances from the level of erotic spectacle to artistic expression as she dragged her young daughter from nightclub to nightclub and hotel to hotel, but ultimately lost her at nine to the Paris child authorities.

It’s December 1999, and 25-year-old Jonah has just graduated from film school. As the new millennium begins, Jonah marries his longtime sweetheart Lila. Over the course of six months, the couple meet a number of interesting people, including Irina, an exiled Russian actress, as well as spending their time with Jonah’s sister Cecile and his filmmaking mentor Anziano. The discussions Jonah has with these friends and strangers help him to gain some perspective on his life and the new millennium.

In Lisbon, French author Paul meets various people from his past who uncover forgotten memories.

Eight years ago, Rosemonde killed a man who tried to rape her. Now she has sold her story to a television channel that produces crime victim films.

Alain Tanner returns forty years later to Genova , Italia, where he worked in a shipping company.

She's a beautiful gifted performer, but her work is not the sort that invites popular acclaim. Despite the fact that she is unlikely to become famous, she enjoys her life as a performer who lives just outside the mainstream. Awaiting her backstage one evening is a Spanish painter who has seen her show and wants to make her acquaintance. They walk around Paris getting to know one another, and then the painter returns to Spain. Something about the man has moved Lady M to passion: she flies to meet him in Barcelona and he shows her his beloved Catalonia. This time, however, their relationship is as much about passionate lovemaking as it is about compatibility. So smitten is Lady M with her new man that when she discovers that the painter has a black wife and child, she is only a little bit taken aback and she invites his whole family to join her in Paris. Surprisingly, they do, and the number of people sharing their love and sexual appetites changes from two to three.

Paul has left his wife and children. Now his wife and ex-mistress is on the hunt for him.

Julie is a young woman from Rose Hill (Mauritius) who arrives in rural Switzerland to marry her older pen-friend Marcel. She feels unhappy until she meets Jean, a younger man. However, his father disagrees.

The efforts of an aspiring filmmaker to include an unwilling female in his production.

The film relates the painful ending of a love story binding an over-30-year-old woman and a North African, and the beginning and end of a relationship she also has with an “established” journalist. The stories illustrate the absolute claim of a woman who can understand love only in terms of life and death, an attitude that generally makes love appear dramatic, but at least burning and flickering, like the flame that glows in her heart.

Jean, a young Swiss whose watchmaking skills no longer prove useful in the real world, dawdles his time away either in his parents' farm or in Lucie's restaurant-bar.

Fed up with the sea, Paul, a Swiss mechanic working in the noisy bowels of a merchant ship, lands in Lisbon.

A young drifter meets up with a strange old man who claims that he has been taught to fly by birds.

Two young women from very different backgrounds journey into the countryside seeking respite from unsatisfactory lives and relationships, but ultimately find that there is no way back to the world they once knew.

A look at the lives of several men and women in their 30s as they confront the slim gains of the "revolutionary" sixties. Max, a dissatisfied copy editor; Myriam, a redhead into tantric sex; and Marie, a supermarket checker who gives unauthorized discounts to the elderly, search for renewed meaning on a communal farm. The title character, a six-year-old child, is the carrier of their hopes for the future.

Paul is married, a successful engineer, and a conservative candidate in an upcoming local election. He falls in love with Adriana, a café waitress from Italy. Paul's party is very critical of foreign labour and wants to keep Switzerland to the Swiss. Where Paul falls deeper and deeper into the relationship and is ready to leave his wife, Adriana feels the social pressure growing and has to make her own decision.

An ode to liberated speech and to the power of words, "those one speaks to others, those one speaks in silence", Alain Tanner's third film is inspired by a poet and a poetic text which deeply affected him as a young director.

Two men, arty though somewhat staid, are drawn to the spirited and quixotic Rosemonde....

On the 100th anniversary of the founding of a watchmaking company in Geneva, Charles Dé the founder's 50-year-old grandson has had it: he speaks eccentrically to a reporter, recognizing his grandfather as a craftsman and his son as a businessman, but is evasive about himself. He gives his family the slip and moves in with a young couple he meets by chance, doing the cooking, reading, drinking, and engaging in philosophical discussions with them. The young couple comes to love Charles. In secret, he stays in touch with a daughter, and the rest of the family hires a private investigator to find him, setting in motion a business take-over that threatens his Bohemian happiness.

Documentary on the construction of Chandigarh, the new capital of the Indian Punjab region, planned by Albert Mayer and Swiss architect Le Corbusier.

A montage of the night-life of Piccadilly Circus across the hours, from early evening to the last lingering passers-by.