Mauro, a judge, is worried about his older sister Marta, who took care of him since he was a boy, and now suffers from mental illness and suicidal thoughts. She seems to recover from her depression when Mauro acquaints her with Giovanni, a brilliant actor at the edge of legality. However, Mauro becomes unconsciously jealous of their relationship.
Cristiano, aged thirteen, seems to be a teen-ager with clear ideas about his future. One evening he meets May, a stranger, who is probably drunk and, so, she ends up in his bed. An unforgettable night... The morning after, May leaves and vanishes. Some years later, a "surprise" knocks at Cristiano's door: a child, his child, sent there by May, who's vanished again. Abandoned by his own parents, Cristiano will assume his responsibilities and will leave with the child to know Milan, the city he lives in and its people.
A man, mirroring the assassinated King, infiltrates a castle to kill the Queen but hesitates, leading to a deadly dare and revelation of shared history.
An architect is assigned to modernize a squatted house in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. But then he meets a young student who is member of a grassroots initiative trying to preserve the quarter. He falls in love with her, although this puts him into conflict with his job. Following his heart, the architect soon changes sides and supports the inhabitants in their struggle against the real estate speculators.
Jean, the lead character in this psychological journey is torn by a search for his lost childhood, the overwhelming need to love a woman of his dreams (someone he has invented), and a struggle with his latent bisexuality. Jean finds some photos inside an automatic photo station that look like his mother who died soon after he was born. He starts to fantasize about the woman, giving her a name and identity and waiting for her to appear. During this time, he meets Carole and has an affair with her, all the while pretending he has this other relationship with the woman in the photo. Significantly, the couple who introduce him to Carole is childless, and they eventually split up - perhaps a comment on the importance of childhood to the adult world. In the end, Carole discovers that Jean's "other woman" has no real existence, causing a crisis that finds a symbolic expression as the last scenes close on the story.
The film is a sort of presentation of Franco Fortini's book 'I Cani del Sinai'. Fortini, an Italian Jew, reads excerpts from the book about his alienation from Judaism and from the social relations around him, the rise of Fascism in Italy, the anti-Arab attitude of European culture. The images, mostly a series of Italian landscape shots, provide a backdrop that highlights the meaning of the text. - Fabrizio Sabidussi
Wealthy woman and her Ethiopian maid form a friendship.
