Bill Baker, an American oil-rig roughneck from Oklahoma, travels to Marseille to visit his estranged daughter, Allison, who is in prison for a murder she claims she did not commit. Confronted with language barriers, cultural differences, and a complicated legal system, Bill builds a new life for himself in France as he makes it his personal mission to exonerate his daughter.
Albert Spaggiari is arrested in Nice and brought to a judge's office for interrogation, but he escapes to South America where he meets a journalist who is investigating the event.
Yacine lives with his brother Jamel in a cramped Parisian apartment. He works as a motorcycle courier, although he is also a brilliant political science student. When a delivery job takes him to the home of his professor Richard Artaud, his life is thrown off course. Both the professor and his wife, an actress, show an extraordinary, if disturbingly paternalistic interest in him. Shortly thereafter, the professor suddenly dies and Yacine makes a strange confession to Eléonore: "I am not dead"
