Christmas approaches and the Lévesque family has once again gathered for their traditional celebration. But this time there is a mixture of emotions running through each person. The patriarch of the family suffers from a combination of Parkinson’s Disease and heart failure. His life reduced in every way, the end approaches and there are unhappy memories of his once violent and authoritarian past. But his wife, ten children and many grandchildren try to maintain a semblance of the Christmas season.

It’s the early 1950s and little Franzi is growing up in the small Austrian town of Judenburg. Her oppressive family home is dominated by her feverish and mentally ill father, who is rigid and unpredictable. Her father, who regularly delivers halves of pork for the butcher, spent several years in the French Foreign Legion in Morocco, Algeria and Syria – a period which he partly glorifies but which still also haunts him. Franzi immerses herself in this world by looking at an abundance of beguiling yet disturbing photographs taken at the time by her father. Her own childish fantasy realm of fairy tales and picture books soon intermingle with nightmares as reality merges with imagination, war, horror and beauty.