Beth, a successful writer of great energy and humour, lives with her French husband, her daughter by a first marriage, and a lodger, in her inner-city home known as Chez Nous. Everyone gets along, despite some occasional tension, until Beth's much younger sister returns from overseas.

Focusing on the troubled mid-teen years of two schoolgirls, this telemovie explores the change in their relationship over a period of a year.

'Most of us watch films but don’t read screenplays. They are odd pieces of writing because they only exist in order to become something else. They necessarily ‘vanish’, as the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière has written. The process of production takes over, and the screenplay disappears, no longer needed, into the film.' (Introduction)