Thierry Lebigre

Full of revolutionary romanticism and also influenced by western culture in his final years at high school, Salmi declares his atheism to his father, but hides from everyone his love for his English teacher, a beautiful young woman from Paris.

Thami works as an extra in foreign films shot in a small village near Ouarzazate. He became a friend of Pier Paolo Pasolini, who shot in 1966 his movie Oedipus Rex in Morocco. Forty years later, an Italian crew comes to Ouarzazate to shoot a film. Thami thinks his friend Pasolini is back in town and thus triggering cinema fever in all the locals.

This film, the first in what has become a semi-autobiographical trilogy for Smihi, follows the everyday experiences of Mohamed-Larbi Salmi against the changing Moroccan society. In 1950s Tangier, Larbi Salmi is a young, timid, pre-teen, boy, trying to make sense of the gentle religious upbringing of his father, the secular education offered him in French school, and his budding desires for the forbidden pleasures of the cinema and the women he meets through it.

Just like so many North Africans, a young Moroccan woman wants to reach Spain by the sea. But she'll face a lot of difficulties along the way.

One day, a potter buys an old frame in which to put the family photos. But the merchant refuses to sell the frame without the photo of a stranger that it already holds. The potter sets off to look for the stranger in order to give back the picture.