The Secret of the Grain, 2007

Very intense, sad movie with banality bringing the hero down. This script would have been impossible to film in the Anglo-Saxon world. It either must have a deeper cynicism, or a happy ending. But this French-Tunisian film has a load of sweetness about family ties and friendship to brave bureaucracy and concealed racism. Yet, for want of a nail, the shoe was lost... 61 year old Sliman Beji is a north-African immigrant in a French port town. He scrambles to support his divorced wife, their children as well as maintain the relationship with his new love and her daughter. He has been working in the ship-yards and suffered the degraded position as an immigrant worker, all for the sake of having his children acquire a better position in France. By now, he loses his job on the yard, because he is regarded as French, and the yards prefer to hire cheap (new) immigrant labor. He is haunted by feelings of inadequacy when especially the daughter of his lover steps in to help him build a new source of income: a restaurant on a ship. Then he is confronted by the racism and bureaucracy of modern France, which (in contrast with the wharf) is treating him as an immigrant. 'This is the France you know' is a phrase that is featured repeatedly. In spite of the barriers the French throw up, Sliman's social network chips in to help. His children, his former wife, his friends. Everybody helps in order to restore the ship, build the restaurant and throw at least one big couscous party, to show the authorities what Sliman is capable of. When everything seemed to have gone wrong, things take a good turn. yet you never succeed in shaking off the creeping premonition that fate will eventually NOT smile on Sliman.

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