Don't Leave Me (Ne me quitte pas)

“Mr Dominique Brulé likes to go to his establishment when it’s still dark out. He always closes his eyes before switching on the lights and opening the blinds as he communicates silently with all his plants and waits a prudent amount of time for them to get back into their jars of water: he imagines that they’ve spent all night mingling with each other. He never catches them moving around, but he will one day. As he opened his shop he thought about locking himself in and just letting himself die there, but when he saw that some of the flowers would survive without water after weeks of neglect, forgotten in the darkness of his grief, he realized that he could live without their love too.”

Behind his discreet facade, Mr Dominique is not just a floricultural artist but a veritable magician: he has secretly turned a small corner of Paris into a garden.

His flower shop, L’étoile manquante, is Mer­cedes and Tilde’s favourite place. They are two Spanish women who have worked in France for more than forty years. They both think that they’re alone, because Mercedes was abandoned by her husband as soon as she crossed the border and Tilde couldn’t find anyone to love.

One day, a hurricane known as Violeta enters their peaceful, melancholy lives. She is a young woman from Madrid, fleeing from a lover who is determined to follow her.