Tout un hiver sans feu (French edition)

The muted winter landscapes of the Swiss Jura mountains mingle fire and ice, mourning and music to interweave two stories of life and love as delicate as the falling snow. The desperate silent tragedy of Jean and Laure, still in shock at the loss of their little girl in a terrible barn fire, plunges the couple into a bleak endless winter of unspeakable grief. Laure is interned for a period to be treated in a clinic. Jean is left to face the harsh, cold and seemingly futile task of trying to eke out a living on the farm on his own. Though their love is no longer nourished by any inner fire, this element seems hauntingly omnipresent in the world outside. Jean, in fact, finds a job in a foundry and spends his days before the furnaces of its leaping flames, as if in constant reminder of the past. Yet, fire is also a source of warmth and comfort, an essential life giving element. At the foundry Jean meets a young Kosovar woman, Labinota, a refugee who has fled the horrors of war. She lives with her own personal grief as she hopes against all hope for the return of a husband who has been missing for six years. As the dead of winter is brightened up by the festivites of Christmas and New Year's, Jean is drawn into Labinota's family and her world of refugees. Through the simple everyday joys of friendship, conversation, a bouquet of flowers, a bottle of wine, music, they are courageously putting together the pieces of a normal life again. A subtle kind of love, based upon solidarity and rooted in a mutual desire to live again, is sparked between Jean and Labinota. Yet Jean's wife Laure is also regaining her strength and the courage to accept the past. And she now realizes she may be losing the only person who will make her truly want to live again.