One Life Remaining

To get beaten or give a beating, to beat oneself up. To beat the odds. Metal is forged by beating. Birds beat their wings, the sun beats down, and our hearts - Under this central trope of 'beating', with its combined negative and positive implications, the film brings together the individual personally lived and the communal, historic perspective; hatred and forgiveness; laughing and crying.

Georges's life is turned upside-down when he meets Yamina and decides to help her. While she seems to be persecuted and living in hiding, Georges's reality is rooted in a daily routine without any surprises. Yamina's stories fascinate him: her happy childhood under the rhythm of a song, the massacres in the 1990s in the Great South, as well as her difficulties in Algeria and then in France. Georges spends more and more time with Yamina and is totally disorientated the day she disappears without a word. As his search for her unfolds, Georges realizes that he knows nothing about her and that every person he meets who knew Yamina seems to have a different version of the young woman's life. Convinced that he must go to Algiers to save her, Georges abandons everything and sets out on a journey without any concrete destination. His quest finally leads him to an oasis in the Sahara, a desert that spreads as widely as this love story between Bonnevoie and Tabelbala.