Looking for Ayda

In southeastern Tunisia, Salem and Halima spend months waiting for news of their son Ahmed, who has been smuggled overseas to Italy.

A forty-year-old writer lives alone, only her cat holds her company. The solitude made her indifferent to the importance for her life. One day, she learns that one of her manuscripts is going to be published, at the very moment when she thought about abandoning everything; writing and maybe even life. However, she messes it up, the news of the publication arrives too late.

Mounira sells fricassees in a used car market, a resolutely masculine place. She has an ambiguous relationship with two men, between desire, seduction and her deep need to assert her place in this world. Mounira tries to sublimate her life as best she can to escape the harsh daily life of this hostile environment.

Ahlem and Najwa, two young women from a poor neighbourhood who work in an elegant pastry shop in Tunis, still dream of their Prince Charming as the only way out of poverty. When a rich client asks her to meet him, Ahlem ventures alone into the city centre and waits for him in vain. A woman walking alone in the streets in the evening cannot be respected…

One winter evening, under the conditions of a state of emergency and quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Farid and Salima's young son goes out without announcing his destination. The mother is worried and tries to contact him, but she cannot reach him. She urges her husband to go out and fetch him. Between worry, confinement, and the stress of remote work, the atmosphere at home becomes tense. The weather worsens, power outages occur, tension rises a notch and turns into a confrontation between the mother and the father.