In this moving narrative Merzak delves into the daily realties of the "beur", the children of the Algerian immigrants who came to work in France's factories during the economic boom of the fifties and sixties. We meet Mok, caught between the reality of the civil war that awaits him in Algiers and his daily struggle for sanity in the Parisian projects. While Alilo, his Algerian cousin, falls in love with a West African neighbor in the adjacent housing project, Mok oscillates between his dual desires of becoming either French, or a successful American style rapper. Merzak's humorous yet unflinching portrayal of this Parisian immigrant community never stumbles into cliché or trite condemnations of French racism, preferring to remain focused on the lives of its characters. The final frame of Mok's goldfish, hovering in its glass bowl, somehow becomes a comment on a life spent in the Parisian projects.