Abdellatif Kechiche's film,
Secret of the Grain, is being screened in Hungarian cinemas, which was first introduced to national audiences at last year's Titanic festival. The Tunisian director-scripwriter of the French drama received the 21st European Film Awards Prix FIPRESCI Critics' Award in 2008.
The Secret of the Grain is a 151-minute-long momentous story about
ambition, frustration, courage and indifference in the everyday lives
of North-African immigrant families in the south of France. A harbour in the South of France. Sete, to be precise. The heavy manual labour in and around the harbour gradually makes way for other activities. Service industries, tourism, catering. Slimane Beiji, divorced, in his sixties, and of Algerian origins, has worked for years on a shipping wharf, but has to accept redundancy. He wants to use his severance pay to convert an old fishing cutter into a North African speciality restaurant. That is more complicated than he thinks. Rym, the teenage daughter of his landlady and mistress, helps him. Kechiche unfolds Slimane's complex family affairs mainly in improvised conversations at the kitchen table of his ex-wife, Saoud. There the extended family turns up on Sundays for a delicious couscous with fish, the dish from the title.
Kechiche succeeds in turning his film into an epic in which acting, form, substance and analysis all come together at one point. The characteristics of his many characters come together to reveal a deep social analysis. With Secret Of The Grain, Kechiche makes it clear that he is the most interesting chronicler of the life of North African emigrants in Europe.
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