I am collecting interviews with my partner, Abido. I hold a video camera in my hand and sit opposite him as he lies on the bed, like in a psychoanalysis session, telling me what he can and wants to remember. I don't care about the form, nor about what I say; it's just raw material, I think. I am doing it to gather all the information I need to build a fictional story about his childhood. Abido is Moroccan; at two years old, he lived in Beni Mellal with his parents, his four-year-old brother, his aunt, and his grandmother. One afternoon, upon returning home, he finds only his aunt and grandmother: his immediate family has left for Italy without saying goodbye. Suddenly left an "orphan" and free, he grows up with few rules and no explanations, nursed by a cow and surrounded by endless lands.
But as I dig into his past through these face-to-face interviews, I realise that something else is moving within that story: our present story is there. Prejudices, cultural diversity, and the daily frictions of raising two young children with opposing worldviews emerge, amplified by his desire to bring the whole family back to his native land. The filmed material becomes cumbersome, transforming into the dilemma itself, a battleground of conflict and discovery. I find myself poisoned by resentment: after the birth of our first daughter, Abido drifted back to Islam, starting to pray and follow the religion pedantically.
I see the abandonment as the root of his fears and Islam as his anchor. Yet, I think this with the judging gaze of someone harbouring prejudices they didn't believe they possessed, in a surge of superiority and forced compassion. Instead, his story forces me to see. We are on opposite sides of the barricade, each convinced we are right. Between wild arguments and sudden reconciliations, while I reconstruct his memories through my own eyes, the film transforms into the intimate, unfiltered diary of an ordinary multicultural couple.