Every family has its hopeful winner. The Martanos, a working class family from Southern Italy relocated to Turin, have Emma. Emma works for the Fiat Group, in the company’s new computer science sector. Since she was small, Emma has worked hard to make her way up the social ladder but just as she is about to earn her graduate degree in Mathematics and marry Silvio, an established engineer for the Turin based company who is a widower with a small child, everything suddenly falls apart after a specific incident takes place. It is September 1980, the Fiat Group announces a mass layoff of 15.000 employees. A long strike breaks out which will last for 37 days. In the heated atmosphere marked by conflicts between the company and factory workers, Emma falls for a young militant man named Sergio, who works in the auto parts division. For the duration of the strike, the young woman has a brief but intense love affair with him, causing her to see her difficult social climb as meaningless, and pushing her to break up with her family and the man who wants to marry her. It is a difficult task to find one’s own destiny when the surrounding world is in turmoil. The bitter conflict splits up the community, the families and single individuals. One era ends in which all hopes have been destroyed, while another begins without promising anything good. In just a few days time, Emma will tragically endure the most important experience of her life.