The film's principal cast includes Claudia Cardinale and Omar Sharif as parents of Azad (Henri Verneuil depicted as child).

The film opens with the court process of Soghomon Tehlirian who was being tried in Berlin for his 1921 Assassination of Talat Pasha, one of the plotters of the Armenian genocide.

This introduces the viewer to the arrival of the Armenian Zakarian family fleeing persecution in the Ottoman Empire to refuge in Marseilles, France.

The film recounts the biography of Azad Zakarian and his parents and aunts, taking us in a 20 year journey of the family facing tough times as refugees.

This is based on the memories of Azad (actually Henri Verneuil himself) starting from a six-year-old kid with many flashbacks to the period of genocide in Turkey.