Areski Belkacem

An ageing punk-with-a-dog and his brother the conformist decide to get their revenge on a shopping mall. Directing duo Benoit Delepine and Gustave Kervern, longstanding comic crusaders against capitalism, again set out to surprise and shock the bourgeois audience.

The idea for this film about a generation and its lost ideals came to Romain Goupil after attending several funerals of friends in the fall of 1996, where the '68 generation, now in influential positions in media or politics, kept meeting each other. It seemed as if the revolution that they had tried to make was being buried with each coffin. A MORT LA MORT is in some ways an homage to this generation, now in their fifties. They were a privileged generation that thought that they could change the world, doing everything that their parents failed to do. There were no actual deaths in France as there were in Germany or Italy, but the system was not ideal for personal issues or for love. There was always a scapegoat for the injustices of the world, be it capitalism or imperialism. That way the blame could be placed somewhere else. Some of the '68 generation are still faithful to the principles of their youth and still continue to fight for the illusions of the past.

In this French crime caper film, a young misfit (Jacques Higelin) who has grown tired of his job as a bank teller deliberately gets fired. When some underworld characters ask him to share the layout of the bank so that they can more effectively rob it, he does. He also joins in the robbery. But when members of the gang start shooting at one another, it becomes clear that he is definitely in over his head.

Areski and Elijah, two childhood friends (an Arab and a Jew) suburban neighbors working on a construction site of Place des festivals (Belleville) and thus participating in what has driven the city face a wildcat strike providing transportation to one of them "under the imponderable."