Giuseppe Tornatore traces three generations of a Sicilian family in in the Sicilian town of Bagheria (known as Baarìa in the local Sicilian dialect), from the 1930s to the 1980s, to tell the story of the loves, dreams and delusions of an unusual community.
Summer, 1967. La Goulette, the touristic beach of Tunisi, is the site where three nice seventeen-year-old girls live: Gigi, sicilian and catholic; Meriem, Tunisian and Arab; Tina, French and Jewish. They would like to have their first sexual experience during that summer, challenging their families. Their fathers, Youssef, Jojo and Giuseppe, are old friends and their friendship will be in crisis because of the girls, while Hadj, an old rich Arab, would like to marry Meriem.
Young Tunisian Hedi lives an ordered life in which he believes there can be no more surprises. His future will play out as other people have planned, until he meets a young woman named Rim at a hotel in Mahdia Hediand. An ostensibly personal story broadens into a panorama of a society in upheaval, an allegory about breaking away from traditions. And a film about the happiness and pain of freedom.
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This film explores the impact of the modern world on the traditional male society of the Maghreb. It is a film about men who prefer to live life as an abstract game and the free-spirited woman who changes everything. Said and Youssef have fulfilled a life-long dream by opening a "chess bar" in the middle of the desert. They sit around drinking palm wine, playing board games and composing love poetry to imaginary women. All this changes with the arrival of Sarah, a sexually liberated, uninhibited metisse who easily lures Youssef into an affair. Soon he is dreaming not about chess but about opening a coffee bar in Genoa. The friendship is destroyed, the bar sold. Youssef, dressed in Western clothes, waits to leave with Sarah; will she show up? Said boards a train and sits down next to a Westernized woman bearing a resemblance to Sarah
