Synopsis: This film, the first in what has become a kind of semi-autobiographical trilogy for Smihi, follows the everyday experiences of a young, timid, pre-teen, boy, Mohamed-Larbi Salmi, who grows up 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. All the while the film offers a tapestry of fifties Tangier–an international zone marked by the influence of Arab, Berber, European, and American histories. “Between Proustian nostalgia and the ‘autobiographical fiction’ as expressed by Charles Dickens, [the film] wants to be part elegy and part anthropology (via image and sound) of a Muslim childhood in Morocco” (Smihi).
