Yvan De Wiel, a private banker from Geneva, is going to Argentina in the midst of a dictatorship to replace his partner, the object of the most worrying rumors, who disappeared overnight. Between hushed lounges, swimming pools, and gardens under surveillance, a remote duel takes place between two bankers who, despite different methods, are the accomplices of a discreet and merciless form of colonization.
In 1992 – 500 years after the beginning of Spain's global empire with the discovery of America – Spain proudly presented itself to the international community as a modern, developed, dynamic country through the Olympic Games in Barcelona and the Expo in Seville. But for filmmaker Luis López Carrasco (1981, Murcia), 1992 was also the year in which the regional parliament building in Cartagena was razed during furious protests against the threatened closure of various local industries. El año del descubrimiento revives this almost forgotten history in a typical Spanish bar in Cartagena, where different generations come together to drink, eat, smoke and talk. Stories from witnesses, demonstrators and strikers from back then and discussions among younger café visitors on themes such as class consciousness, the economic crisis and the role of unions percolate to the surface amidst talk of other life issues.
Marina, Sofía and Violeta are three teenage sisters who have just suffered the loss of the grandmother who raised them. Each one will live the mourning in her own way, in a house inhabited by a myriad of memories, responsibilities and tensions.
Marcos is an experienced nurse. He works in the night shift of a provincial private clinic. He is applied and professional but has a secret: in some extreme cases he applies euthanasia. He'll soon meet someone that knows what he's doing.
Inès, a professional photographer, decides to complete a book she is working on before she gives birth to her first child. This photography project, related to the memories of her childhood, always brings her back to the same place: the family home in southern Argentina that shaped her youth and forged her character. It also contains the only photo Inès still has of her with her father, before he disappeared as a victim of the military dictatorship. This photo is the starting point of a jigsaw puzzle of fragmentary memories about the relationships Inès had with her mother and her brother.
The key to the communal laundry room in the block of flats on the Rue de Genève 85 in Lausanne serves a much greater function than merely unlocking the door. This encounter between a symbol of typical Swiss mentality with a penchant for order and the tenants who have been housed here by the city’s social services department is not something to be taken for granted. Although the laundry room is normally located in the cellar, the tenants in this building share a tiny laundry room off the entrance hall because the cellar is reserved for prostitution. To maintain order and cleanliness, the landlord hires Claudina, a new “laundry woman”.
In the South of Spain, a multicolored pigeon race will be won not by the fastest bird, but the one who will be able to seduce a female pigeon and fly alongside her the longest.
In 1810 in Buenos Aires, the revolution is at its height, fuelled by Rousseau's ideas. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, in the south of the country, a rain of ash disrupts a French expedition and a young woman, Marie Archange is left behind. All alone, in her head she hears Rousseau's minuet in G Minor, which gives her the strength she needs to continue on her way.
