Ody Roos

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.

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.

The title of the film, set in Luxembourg in 1942, during the Nazi occupation, amalgamates the words Schacko (helmet) and chapeau claque (opera hat). The village, in which it is set, has not yet been feeling the effects of the war at this point.

A man is shot down in a provincial airport. Despite his wounds he manages to drag himself to his plane bound for Italy, unaware that the killers are already waiting for him at his destination. During the flight he reminisces about the events that led him there. His name is Matou and he was a Formula 1 champion before being banned from racing circuits for causing a fatal accident. Matou ran away in the company of Lena, his employer's girlfriend. But while they were in the open country they got shot at by mysterious pursuers, which was the beginning of a wild manhunt.