Secret of the Grain
Fish couscous has never looked so good nor the émigré experience so real as in Tunisian-French director Abdellatif Kechiche’s intimate saga of an extended family living in the French seaport of Sète. Grey-haired Tunisian immigrant Slimane is let go after 35 years, some of it under the table, as a dockworker.
With his severance pay he dreams of turning an old freighter into a restaurant with his ex-wife’s renowned mullet couscous as the specialty.
This doesn’t sit well with his current girlfriend, who hoped he would put the money into renovating her rundown hotel. Meanwhile, the white financial officers and city bureaucrats, one of whom doesn’t know he has an illicit tie to Slimane’s family, place one hurdle after another before the taciturn old man.
But the hotelkeeper’s determined daughter Rym steps up to make the project succeed for her cherished stepfather and organizes a go-for-broke dinner party to seduce potential investors and the city’s big shots. (The San Francisco Film Festival)
Starring: Habib Boufares, Hafsia Herzi, Farida Benkhetache, Abdelhamid Aktouche, Bouraouïa Marzouk , Alice Houri, Leila D’Issemio