On a film set in Spain, cast and crew are waiting for the director to arrive. Boredom makes them engage in abusive power games and sexual intrigues. When the director finally shows up on set, mayhem ensues.

Harold is a social misfit in his early twenties and obsessed with death. When he meets Maude, an eccentric septuagenarian widow who thinks life should be lived to the fullest, his views are shaken and his desire to die fades.

The “dreamer” is Jacques, a young painter, who by chance runs into Marthe as she's contemplating suicide on the Pont-Neuf in Paris. They talk, and agree to see each other again the next night.

Yves is considered an ineducable lost cause by the institution for psychiatric care.

1970. THE WAR in Vietnam is escalating. President Nixon has decided on a secret bombing campaign of Cambodia. There is massive public protest in the United States and elsewhere.

“Socrates was a guy just like Roberto [Rossellini]... He pissed everyone off, just by simply expanding on things, by going a little further. He had nothing of his own: he took from others and adapted things.”

“On the other side of the bay from Minamata, on the islands off the coast of Amakusa and Kagoshima, I spent over a hundred some days going around showing Minamata films with my staff with a simple intention: I knew that although there were many Minamata victims there, through pressure from either

“Amid this cinematic spectacle, familiar from previous films but now considerably larger and more violent, something very different is going on. In Peasants of the Second Fortress there are occasional moments when the action of the film grinds to a halt and people simply talk.

A single mother is confused by the changes in her teenage son, who has become distant since spending summer vacation with his father.