Omar Bekhaled

Set in France in 1961-1962 during the Algerian War, Living in Paradise is a thought-provoking examination of the lives of North African immigrants trying to find a place in the social system of Western Europe.

The quiet agony of a mother whose daughter grows up to pursue her own life is chronicled in this realistically presented French drama. The Circuit Carole of the title refers to a motorbike racetrack. Jeanne and her 20-year old daughter Marie share a small apartment in a working-class Parisian neighborhood; the two live harmoniously, but the daughter is restless and anxious to set out on her own. Marie then takes a job in a northern suburb and their lives are forever changed. The racetrack is near her work; Marie is enthralled by the racers and their fast machines. Along with her new boyfriend, a racer, Marie begins riding herself. She then moves out of her mother's flat, leaving Jeanne bereft of companionship and a purpose in her life. Her silent, deeply internalized grief eventually drives her completely mad.

The story of the struggle of an autistic girl and her brother trying to survive without their parents.

Ibrahim, a Kurdish refugee, is hired by a French health care mutual which repatriates the bodies of dead Africans to their countries of origin. The day following his employment, he attends his first body recovery in a Paris-area apartment. All of a sudden Ibrahim is plunged into a baffling universe that will make him a modern Charon, the ferryman who,in Greek mythology, carried the souls of the newly deceased to the world of the dead.