Amira Chebli

Once upon a time Barisa ... Waitress by day, charming at night, she carries in her the pains of a ruined life ... will she learn from these mistakes?

Rim, a Tunisian woman, works in France as an interpreter for asylum-seekers. Every day, she translates the stories of exiled men and women whose voices question her own history.

After more than two decades working for Tunisia national public radio, Youssef is on his way to retirement. Somewhere in the town of Sidi Bouzid, a young man sets himself on fire. Youssef is viciously cut off broadcasting during the last issue of "Tunis by night". As he leaves the radio station, he gets picked up by a police patrol car waiting for him and he spends a few hours in police custody. Amal (his wife) finds refuge again in prayer and the elder brother Amin, tries to put his family's pieces back together as well as he can. Their youngest daughter Aziza lives completely disconnected from the pace and values of her family. She cuts her veins after a cascade of problems. Revolted but silent, Youssef takes refuge at the "Saint George", the adjacent bar he has been a patron forever. He empties his mind after emptying a few bottles of wine. Youssef then runs away from his family to be engulfed by a city he does not recognize anymore.

Gian, a 65-year-old ethnomusicology professor, fights the darkness caused by the sudden onset of amnesia. Flashes of the past, that blend with hazy archive footage, haunt his mind like a phantasmagoria of images. Despairing, Gian tries to end things, but he fails. In the aftermath, Miriam, the daughter he does not recognize, moves into his apartment with her son Elyas. She helps him find a diary written into his twenties that revolves around Leila, a girl with whom he discovers love in the space of one night. This emotion exacerbates Gian’s pain but pushes him to recover his memory.

In these huge houses of the petty Tunisian bourgeoisie, when a tragedy occurs, everything is done to hide it.

Youssef, a nobody with tons of debts and nothing in his life, is offered a job by his uncle to oversee the construction of an elementary school in the far away rural town of Ragouj. He learns the good and bad of his new home and its people.

A historical fiction story that goes back to the 1990s where a passionate suburban young man seeks his destiny in the dark streets of the Tunisian capital, stumbles across love, on his journey of perfecting the art of traditional Mezwed.