Synopsis
At only 13, Benjamin is a little soldier at war with life, with adults and with himself. He is a troubled kid
with a tormented soul and goes back and forth into foster homes since the age of five.
Eventually, his mother goes to jail and revels to Benjamin the existence of his father. For Benjamin there is just one goal; getting out of foster care. So when the social worker gave him the choice, he decides to go live at this unknown father’s place.
Karim Zeroubi, his father, is a man in his forties and a warehouse worker for the city hall, he lives with
his parents in the Parisian suburbs. Karim is a broken man who never made it out of that neighborhood,
he is just content living his life, or better yet just waiting to die.
Benjamin’s joining, has utterly turned his father’s and the whole family’s life upside down, his violence
and extreme frailness scares his new family who does not know how to go about him. The kid who is
an emotional truly-burly, is going to awake his grandparents, Kader and Zohra, who were in a grieving state since years.
While randomly wandering in the area, he meets Claude, a poet who lives in a lost trailer on waste
ground. Their relationship is based on surreal and poetic conversations, both of them are artists.
Progressively, Benjamin starts opening up to the world and to his family, but mostly, he starts unveiling
himself to him as well as to his art.
And then, there is all the neighborhood, revolving around this family. Nounours, the building’s caretaker
and Karim’s friend, who did not make it out of the hood either and carries a heavy secret. Mr. Teddy, an
old racist of west-indie origin who does not like African people and throws bags full of shit on them.
There is also another very present character, the hood itself; it holds in it all these vain hopes and lenient laments of all its inhabitants, but also their laughs and dreams.