Numbert (2004)

One night, in the early 20th century, on board a transatlantic liner, a strange character, Numbert, tells another passenger the reason for his journey to America. The man is obsessed by numbers, by the figures in things, and has now met another passenger who is a mathematician and who will probably understand him.
Numbert explains, always with a sense of humour between childishness and absurdity, the strange events of his life. He was a miner, and everyone believed he was mute. In fact, however, he only pretended to be. Until one day he became mute for real in front of a woman. A woman who appeared and disappeared from his life. He has spent years looking for her. Now, at last, he thinks he knows where she is. Numbert visits a doctor to be cured of his muteness. Under the effects of a kind of hypnosis, he sees a series of incomprehensible scenes. He does not understand them but we, the audience, recognise them at once: they are principle scenes in the history of the 20th century, and the appalling figures are their protagonists. Numbert asks another passenger for a favour. In exchange, he will give him something he found in the mine one day: he needs to know what number he must say to the woman when he meets her, the number that says everything. But will he reach the end of his journey?