Magyd Cherfi

Jahwad is thirty years old and going nowhere fast. He flunked out of school, and slipped into petty crime. Now, he has the police on his tail. So Jahwad is no longer going nowhere, he is getting out of town as fast as he can. He hitches a ride with a schoolteacher, who is desperate at being posted to one of the toughest high schools in the Paris suburbs. The man is so frantic, he rams his car into a tree. For Jahwad, the opportunity is too good to miss, but the high school dropout hardly looks the part.

It's the year of the baccalaureate for Magyd, a little Arab from rue Raphaël, northern districts of Toulouse. A formality for the French, a seismic event for the “native”. Just think, the first Arab ferry in the city. The end of a tunnel, the climax of a long standoff with fate, under the incessant loving pressure of the all-powerful mother and the jeering quelibets of the gang. Because it is not good to pass for an “intellectual” after school, in the periphery of “living together”; Magyd and his inseparable friends, Samir the activist and Momo the chat artist, experience it on a daily basis.