The Taste of Koumiz

In a quiet little French town, two detectives are tasked with investigating the brutal rape and murder of a preteen girl.

Twenty-something Freddy is becalmed in a podunk French village where the only sign of life is the local amateur brass band and youth aimlessly roaming around the countryside on scooters. He has an intense sexual connection with his girlfriend but has no joy or passion to give her. When she falls for a handsome Arab youth a tragedy unfolds.

El Hadj is studying in Paris. He is one of the young Senegalese men who have come to Paris since the French colony became independent to get a good education so that he can serve his fatherland on his return. Unexpectedly he is suddenly confronted by a problem with his residence papers, just because he has arranged an extension too late. His pleasant life filled with good prospects has gone in one fell swoop. He faces a dilemma. He can stay illegally in France, the country where he feels at home, where he has his friends, has fallen in love and can drink water from the tap. Or he can return (without graduating) to the 3rd-world country of Senegal to use the knowledge he has acquired. It is not only a practical choice. It comes down to the question of who he is, who he thought he could be.

A man returns home after a long journey. The curtains in the open windows flutter in the breeze. His wife sleeps. And he recognises nothing of what was once so familiar. Stretching the boundaries of poetry, science-fiction and documentary film, and with Chris Marker and Andrei Tarkovsky firmed lodged in his mind, he wanders through the remains of an Aral Sea in the throes of draught, metaphor for a landscape, a world and a country which no longer exist.