On a cold winter morning in the vineyards of a small village in the
Gard region of France, the contorted body of a young woman, Mona Bergeron, is discovered in a ditch. The local
gendarmes quickly determine she is a vagrant who froze to death, and she is buried in a
potter's field. Mona's last winter is revealed through flashbacks framed by interviews with those who crossed paths with her. She wanders the country alone, hitchhiking, sleeping in a tent, and doing odd jobs to survive. She endures hunger, thirst, cold, and a scarcity of tobacco and
cannabis. On her journey, Mona meets a housekeeper, a family of goat farmers, a professor specialising in
plane trees, a
Tunisian vineyard worker, and a group of homeless youths who spend their time drinking, doing drugs, and committing petty crimes at a railway station. She tells one companion that she left her life as a secretary in Paris to seek freedom and life without responsibility. Mona's boots fall apart, and after she loses her tent and sleeping bag in a fire at a
squat in
Nîmes, she is left with only a blanket for warmth. She stumbles across a bizarre harvest festival, where she is daubed with wine dregs by men in strange costumes. After escaping, she wanders into a vineyard, where she falls into a ditch. Tired, cold, wet, and now injured, she does not get up, and succumbs to the elements. ==Cast==