The short film La Jetée opens up with a child silently watching the jets take off from the Orly Airport. He then sees a man running, before he is shot and killed. The plot then continues chronologically through the storyline; beginning at the end of the World War III. Paris is in ruins and the survivors of the war live below ground. Frantically trying to save their deceased dead families, scientists are researching time travel in order to save the present.
The scientist plan to send a prisoner they have to the future to ask for aid. Before they do so, they want to make sure the time travel will work and therefore sends him for a test-run to the past. The main character is then sent back to the strongest memory he has, from when he was a little boy and watched a man die. There was another woman there during the commotion, and the main character fell in love with her image over the years.
The man spends a long time together with the woman and they fall in love. He is then taken back to present time, before he is sent to the future. He is given aid to help his destroyed society before he returns, yet again, to the present time. When he returns, he learns that he is to be executed. Before he does, the people of the future tell him that they want to help and can be sent to the future permanently. Instead, he wished to go back to the past and be reunited with the woman he fell in love with.
He is sent back in time, where he sees the woman. He runs toward her, before he realizes that there is an assassin from the camp there. He is shot and sees that the child version of him is watching. He realizes that the person that died from his memory was the death of himself.
