Under threat in Algeria, Ismaël emigrates to France the time it takes for the people who he’s fleeing from to forget about him. He employs the myth of Jonas and the whale to tell the tale of his clandestine journey.
Elsewhere in France an elderly farmer loses his youngest son. His three other children help him through the ordeal of the funeral while he progressively sinks into a kind of melancholy indifference, slowly losing his desire to live. The two stories unfold parallel to each other.