Nabil Djedouani

In a Mediterranean country plunging into armed conflict, a doctor tries to do his duty against all odds, until the day his destiny is turned upside down…

In the furnace of Algiers, the camera follows and accompanies Ibrahim, Adam, and Ismael, originally from sub-Saharan Africa, in an irregular situation who live in this hotel with the predestined name. They live from odd jobs. One is an elevator operator in a building, the second is a shoemaker and the third works in the construction sector. The other side of immigration from sub-Saharan Africa. Behind the statistics hide people, bodies waiting to be able to start another life elsewhere. A hotel thus becomes a transit point in which stories and hopes mingle, a place which seems suspended in time and space. A static journey waiting for another to begin.

Slimane, an old, weary, and sick trucker, and Smaïn, his loader, are tasked with transporting a cargo deep into the Algerian Sahara. Along the way, they are violently attacked and their truck is stolen. When Anna, a young French researcher, and Sofiane, her traveling companion, come to their aid, the film plunges with them into the desert.

February 1980, young Abdelkader Lareiche was shot in the head by a building guard in a housing estate in Vitry. In a context marked by several racist crimes and a policy of security repression, his friends are mobilizing around the “Rock Against Police” movement. Forty years after the events, Philomène sets out to meet the activists and actors of this movement. “Memory is not commemoration, it is the living part of History” confides Mounsi about the massacre of October 17, 1961. This is the heart of Nabil Djedouani’s project, to restore a moment in a living way. of the militant history of the suburbs, registered here in the Rock Against Police movement, but which cannot be restricted to it. A thread stretched from the 1980s to today, which continues to “analyze the collective and murderous unconscious of the French State” and the ways of resisting and revolting.

A man ascends a barren summit. It is Judas, come to collect Jesus and carry him down the mountain on his back, joking and panting as he does so. After bathing in the river and taking part in a henna ceremony, Jesus leaves for Jerusalem. Judas is concerned for his friend’s safety, since the Roman occupiers look upon the prophet as an insurgent.