Élise o la vida de verdad

Élise is a reserved and modest twenty-year-old who hardly cares about having a life of her own, subjugated as she is by the protective and maternal relationship that binds her to her little brother. They are both orphans and lead a precarious but peaceful existence with her grandmother in Bordeaux. The brother, looking for other horizons and willing to start in the militant life at all costs, moved to Paris. Élise follows in his footsteps and will get a job on the assembly line of a car factory, where she begins to be aware of true life: the relentless productive demand to satisfy an incipient mass consumption; the racial tension between, on the one hand, French workers and, on the other, Algerian, Moroccan or Spanish immigrants; the difficulty of getting along in the big city and its outskirts, whose presence is as unsettling and lonely at times as it is fascinating at others. In the factory he comes into contact with Arezki, an Algerian colleague who suffers, like most of his compatriots, the arbitrary and inconsiderate treatment of the bosses and the police, who sees in all the Algerians in Paris subversive cells in support of independence, for which a bloody war is waged at that time (it is the year 1957). Little by little and in secret, the distance between their respective worlds is reduced until it dissolves in a passionate and exciting love story.