La Dispute

There's no marivaudage here, just unfiltered talk about marital strife, the harbinger of love breakdown. Because they are in the best position to talk about it - and yet often the least heard - director Mohamed El Khatib invites the children of separated parents to deliver their own points of view.

Reality always plays the leading role in Mohamed El Khatib's works. Never shying away from any area of investigation, he prefers experience to expertise, sources to digressions, personal testimonies to professional analyses. Far from the alarming clinical picture painted by psychologists, legal experts and sociologists of the impact of divorce on children's lives, he spent several months meeting around a hundred eight-year-olds from different backgrounds. In the midst of the heartbreak, how do they live with their parents' decision? What words do they put to this crucial event in their young lives? How do they view this break-up of a sentimental commitment they believed to be unconditional? Had they guessed it? Did they take sides? Trapped in the ruins of a split family unit, how do they "remake" their lives? What questions would they like to ask their parents? Shaped by the prism of childhood from the moment it was written, Mohamed El Khatib's new fiction about reality walks a fine line between audacity and modesty, emotion and mischief