A small Algerian town, off the beaten track of the war that is tearing the country apart. At the heart of the crisis that is destroying it, two young men, without work, without leisure activities, without hope, without anything... The film follows them in their daily wanderings between endless boredom and the expectation of the improbable. And shows their humour, their friendship, their will to live regardless.
Using archive material and present-day accounts, the recalls the life of the Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon. In 1953, at the age of twenty eigh, Fanon was appointed head doctor at the psychiatric hospital in Blida-Joinville, a few kilometres from Algiers. As amedical student in Paris, he had been appalled by the living conditions of the Algerian immigrants and gave over the rest of his brief life to analysing the alienation of the black man, of colonised people and man in general. The forcefulness of his writing - as in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth - and the pertinence of his reasoning still resonate strongly into today's world.
