It's Independence Day in Lebanon: three women who've never met before are on the same bus heading to visit a prison situated in a remote area of the country. Traveling through an arid landscape littered with mines and decapitated dreams, the journey transforms into the women's quest for their own independence.

On a beach in Beirut, Lili and Michel meet… or maybe they are coming together again. An unlikely couple caught between two different eras, between a future and a past that seem possibly interchangeable, they are trying to establish what is an ambiguous memory: that of a terrorist act, an explosion and the loss of a child, Elena. The voice of a Japanese narrator adds a further layer of complication to their scrambled memories in evoking his own past in war-torn Beirut and the 27 years he spent alongside Palestinians as a member of the Japanese Red Army. Michel and Lili’s destiny seems subject to the mystery that this man, the legendary screenwriter of the Japanese New Wave, Masao Adachi, has created for them, and which he punctuates with a series of revelations.

Santa Claus tries to outrun a gang of knife-wielding youth. It's one of several vignettes of Palestinian life in Israel - in a neighborhood in Nazareth and at Al-Ram checkpoint in East Jerusalem. Most of the stories are droll, some absurd, one is mythic and fanciful; few words are spoken. A man who goes through his mail methodically each morning has a heart attack. His son visits him in the hospital. The son regularly meets a woman at Al-Ram; they sit in a car, hands caressing. Once, she defies Israeli guards at the checkpoint; later, ninja-like, she takes on soldiers at a target range. A red balloon floats free overhead. Neighbors toss garbage over walls. Life goes on until it doesn't.