iris turns thirty this year. She spends her nights watching movies and her days dreaming of love larger than film. Her mother, an eccentric artist, and her friends keep telling her to change her life, strive for harmony or relax by means of sex. Yet Iiris is looking for nothing less than true romance: love goes deep, for sex just a few inches is deep enough.

Her dreams appear to come true when she meets Marko, a film director who can raise life high above the mundane. But who, in the end, are right: the romanticists or the cynics? Is perfect happiness just an illusion, are relationships always laden with secrets and lies? Before finding the answer, four women - and a couple of men, too - are sent to the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Lovers and Leavers is a film of modern-day Helsinki, relationships and the illusion of happiness. Based on Katja Kallio´s book by the same title.