On a full moon night, the young Najwa and the musician Mansour reach Beirut. They follow the trail of smugglers to join a woman on the other side of the sea. A few streets away, Selim, the old lighthouse keeper, tries to repair the electricity of his neighborhood.
Patrick Perrault, a photo-journalist covering the war in Beirut in the late 1980s, is himself caught up in the hostilities when one day he is picked up and bundled into a car at gun-point. Blind-folded, he is taken to an unknown location where he discovers that he is being taken hostage by Lebanese guerrillas.
In July 1982, the Israeli army besieged Beirut. Four days earlier, Jocelyne Saab sees her house burn and 150 years of family existence go up in smoke. She then takes refuge in questioning: when did this all begin? How did the Beirut people live the siege? Each place will then become a story and each name a memory.
After the battle of Kfar Chouba in Lebanon in January 1975, Larbi Nasri, a young Algerian journalist, was caught in the whirlwind of events preceding the civil war. Linked to Maha, Hind, Raouf and Michel who surround Nahla, he witnesses the construction of the myth of Nahla, a singer adored by the Arab population. One day Nahla loses her voice on stage. The atmosphere of crisis that reigns around her is spreading like an infection. Larbi, fascinated, loses his footing and gets bogged down.