A man returns to his native Algeria to visit his dying father there, at a time when the French colonial hold on that country is coming to its end.

Jean, on hearing of his father's illness, returned to Algeria, his native country, which he had forgotten. On his return everything hurts him, first his father, an old ruined settler, who lives with his mother in a modest apartment in Bab-el-Oued and lives with memories of the past, then the general environment. Filmed in Algiers and in the Mitidja plain from September 1961 to January 1962, with Algerian and Pied-noir technicians and actors, when soldiers, barbed wire and bombs formed the foreground of the landscape.—Maghreb des Films