June 1940, in the midst of the Battle of France, a desperate journey of survival unfolds after a German air raid on a column of refugees fleeing Paris claims the lives of Paulette’s parents and her pet dog. The traumatized five-year-old is taken in by a nearby peasant family, where she soon forms a deep bond with a ten-year-old boy, Michel Dollé, whose family opens their home to her.
Paulette and Michel find themselves navigating a world of rubble, fear, and fragility. To cope with the chaos around them, they quietly create a small cemetery among the ruins of an abandoned watermill. There they bury Paulette’s dog and begin to lay to rest other animals as well, marking each grave with crosses stolen from a local graveyard—several of them bearing the marks of Michel’s own family, including a cross that belonged to Michel’s brother. This secret project becomes a fragile ritual that gives them a sense of control and memory amid the bombardment of their daily lives.
As the adults in their world become entangled in the practical and moral turmoil of war, Michel’s father grows suspicious that their neighbor may have stolen the crosses, and the truth eventually comes to light: the cross that once belonged to Michel’s brother was indeed taken, and Michel himself is implicated in taking crosses for their makeshift cemetery.
Complications escalate when French gendarmes arrive at the Dollé household to remove Paulette from Michel’s care. The thought of separation tears at the boy, who offers a desperate bargain to his father: if he reveals the locations of the stolen crosses, Paulette could stay. Yet when the father does not honor his part of the deal, Michel makes a drastic choice and destroys the crosses by tossing them into the stream, attempting to erase the symbols of their secret world.
The story shifts toward the woman’s side of Paulette’s life as she ends up at a Red Cross camp. But even there, the echoes of what she and Michel built together linger. In the final moment, Paulette is seen breaking away from the crowd at the camp, running toward the people she loves—first crying for Michel, then for her mother—as if seeking both memory and reunion amid the upheaval of war.
The film presents a stark, intimate portrait of childhood under siege, where friendship and grief intertwine, and where small acts of care—like a shared burial ground in a ruined landscape—become lifelines that anchor two children to each other and to a semblance of innocence amid the wreckage around them.
