Marie Codebecq

The daily lives of the personnel of the St-Vincent hospital in Montréal.

Everyone can have a bad day now and then, but we meet Valerie on a morning that divides her life neatly into before and after. It took one inconsequential setback – a silly thing, really – to cause a slight delay in Valerie’s schedule, resulting in a regrettable distraction, causing an unfortunate incident, which leads her to the police station….. making her miss the single most important event she had on her agenda: The Meeting! That’s when the dam breaks. All that control to build the fragile framework of her life collapses instantly. Valerie gets fired, is obliged to restrain her lifestyle, and now with the shared custody of her son in question, Valerie has to review her priorities and reorganize her life.

The elevator is therapy for a man trying to get to the top floor of an enormous skyscraper in the company of some of humanity’s most annoying specimens.

Living somewhere in present-day Quebec, Boris Malinowski has achieved all his goals. A freethinker, open-minded and proud, he also displays a certain arrogance when it comes to his successes. For some time now, his wife Béatrice, a Canadian government minister, has been bedridden, suffering from a mysterious depression. To escape from his wife’s agony, Boris begins a relationship with a colleague, Helga, and gets close to Klara, a young woman who works as a maid in Boris’s home. The sudden appearance of a stranger in his life forces Boris to come face-to-face with the world, with everything he takes for granted, with all his certainties.

Two women, with diametrically-opposed lives, get stuck into an elevator together by happenstance, and learn about each other's life and story to pass the time