Une histoire d’amour et de désir

Amour, the spiritual, chaste love and désir, the physical love, the desire:
These contradictory feelings awaken in shy first-semester student Ahmed when he meets Farah in a course on Arabic love literature, who has just moved to France from Tunisia for her studies and promptly demands a city tour from him. But just as Farah can speak French better than Ahmed would have expected, Farah's assumption that Ahmed, as a Parisian, knows the city like the back of his hand does not stand up to reality: as the son of an Algerian family who had to leave the country due to his father's journalistic work, Ahmed grew up in the Parisian banlieue - touristy Paris is just as foreign to him as the confrontation with Arabic erotic literature, which was previously unknown to him.

Leyla Bouzid's second feature film is not only a sensual hymn to physical desire and love, but also a subtle coming-of-age story that breaks with clichés and focuses on young Ahmed's search for identity.