Fiorella Campanella

The indomitable urge of the human spirit comes face to face with the societal pressures that keep young women's wants, bodies and desires under wraps in these short stories set amongst nature.

40-year-old Bertrand has been suffering from depression for the last two years and is barely able to keep his head above water. Despite the medication he gulps down all day, every day, and his wife's encouragement, he is unable to find any meaning in his life. Curiously, he will end up finding this sense of purpose at the swimming pool, by joining an all-male synchronised swimming team.

After his crew breaks up, a gifted but insecure hip-hop dancer teaches at a top ballet school in Paris, where he falls for an aspiring ballerina.

The story of an adult and a teenage couple during a brief summer holiday by the sea. While Nic's parents remain trapped in a precarious mutual dependency despite repeated attempts at reconciliation, their 12-year-old son tries to come to terms with his father's traumatizing violent outbursts in games with other children. He tries to teach Marie, who is of his age and suffers from her own relationship with her father, to feel nothing. In fact, both of them are transformed by their experience of the joys and pains of first love.

The discovery of Aurore's body with a supernatural finger...

In a loveless relationship, Zoé ditches her faceless boyfriend in a cheap motel room and sets off north without a penny to her name. She hitch-hikes, pilfers a meal from a gas station, encounters strangers who could be her next ride or a passing glimpse, ambling toward some unknown destination. At the end of her pilgrimage, Zoé reaches the English Channel; on the ferry a woman mysteriously disappears. A new coat gives Zoé a new identity, but even in a new country she's not quite sure she's escaped herself.

Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor-in-chief of French fashion bible Elle magazine, has a devastating stroke at age 43. The damage to his brain stem results in locked-in syndrome, with which he is almost completely paralyzed and only able to communicate by blinking an eye. Bauby painstakingly dictates his memoir via the only means of expression left to him.