Jean Daskalidès

Octave Verbrugge, a powerful Belgian building contractor, met Hugo Saint-Laurent, a brilliant French engineer, during a business trip and made friends with him. Now that his bureau of expertise is experiencing difficulties with one of their important projects he has the idea to hire his friend to help resolve the problem. Hugo agrees and stays as a guest at Octave's home in Ghent, where the promoter lives with his two unmarried sisters, Françoise, a beautiful but mysterious woman, and Aurélie, a very strict and withdrawn lady.

The miseries of alcoholism, both for the alcoholic and anyone close to him, are the focus of this routine story about Mathilde, a devoted wife, and her husband Pierre, who is addicted to the bottle. The opening scene is at a New Year's party where Pierre disappears, and Mathilde starts remembering their life together in flashbacks that tell the whole story. Mathilde is ever-suffering, and Pierre is on the whole revolting, so why she hung in there for so long is hopefully made clear in these flashbacks.

A South African spinster murders her father after he rapes the wife of the black foreman for his plantation.

A young Algerian in Paris has not been as successful as he claims in letters home, and when his mother unexpectedly arrives for a visit of several months, he is hard put to hide his circumstances -- and the fact that he has resorted to small-time criminal activity to support himself. His mother disembarks in her traditional attire, a warm-hearted woman who does not have a clue as to how this foreign society functions but also has absolutely no inhibitions about finding out, if the need arises. As the story progresses, the mother catches on to her son's circumstances though the two are still not able to confront the deception and right it. Even with a low budget, this first-time feature-length story by Bahloul Bahloul combines satire, comedy, and pathos to bring home a relationship between mother and son that transcends life's many obstacles.