Octobre noir, Malek, Saïd, Karim et les autres…

February 1939. Overwhelmed by the flood of Republicans fleeing Franco's dictatorship, the French government's solution consists in confining the Spanish refugees in concentration camps where they have no other choice than to build their own shelters, feed off the horses which have carried them out of their country, and die by the hundred for lack of hygiene and water... In one of these camps, two men, separated by barbwire, will become friends. One is a guard the other is Josep Bartoli (Barcelona 1910 - New York 1995), a cartoonist who fights against the Franco regime.

1889. Having come to France as part of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show Tour for the Paris World Fair, Rahimé Valladier, known as the Mexican, sets off in search of the Holy Spirit, a treasure supposedly left behind by his ancestors, Protestants from the Cévennes who had fled Catholic repression following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). Back on his ancestral land, and despite the new-found freedom of religion, he discovered the Cévennes people's struggle to survive: after the boom in silkworms and mining, the Cévennes became impoverished from the mid-19th century onwards. At the same time, a law imposed the French language on schools, to the detriment of Occitan. A culture was dying.