Ahmed, a young commuter, born in France to Algerian parents, meets on the benches of the Farah faculty, freshly arrived from Tunis. The film begins with a classic love at first sight, but very quickly Leyla Bouzid scrambles the tracks and shatters the clichés about youth from immigrant families.
The film responds to a lack of delicacy and intimacy.
Ahmed is also shy and overwhelmed by his desire that Farah is spontaneous and much more enterprising than him, and it is by discovering the delights of Arab erotic literature, and yes, it does exist, that the two lovebirds will draw their own. tender card. With delicacy and humor, the director deals with themes very rarely approached in the cinema for these characters, the relationship to the body, the injunction to virility and even sentimental exchange through writing.
Kad Merad is a failed theater actor who, to make ends meet, agrees to go and stage a play in prison with inmates. A triumph is what you might call a feel-good movie, based on a true story that took place in Sweden in the 1980s.
Not without difficulty, facing the foreseeable reluctance of the prisoners, the character of Kad Merad manages to convince them to play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, discovering the text, which they enrich with their verve, these men live in their flesh the blossoming that culture allows, a real sesame towards a form of freedom, in their prison world.
It is thanks to Dany Boon that we were able to finalize the financing of the film.
Exciting play by the troop, surprising ending, A triumph has everything to seduce the public, yet the film was very difficult to produce.
The director never ceases to examine Israeli society in all its complexity. Laila in Haifa is not his best film, it installs a coldness that puts the characters at a distance, but hey, the charm ends up acting.
In a theatrical form, Amos Gitaï films a long evening in an art bar-gallery in the city of Haifa, where men, women, gay or straight, Jews, Arabs, Israelis, Palestinians rub shoulders. From the story of five women, it is a mini-society that deploys its disillusions, its hopes, in a country where the border between truth and lies deeply penetrates the social body.