Salât al-Janâza

Salât al-Janâza tells the story of three young people born in Algeria. Their father has died. Nour is thirty years old and causes a commotion in the town of Nowhere – perhaps New York. Nabil is twenty-five and works as a taxi driver in Lyon. He wants to settle in Tahiti. Together with his sister Nadia, aged twenty, who wants to be an actress and works as a waitress, they send money to their uncle, who has stayed behind in Algeria, to have a grave built for their father. Both are subjected to insults and advances from fascinated French people. In Algeria, Nadia is reunited with her cousin Yasmina. They go to the cemetery. But Nadia’s father does not have the grave he was promised; he is ‘buried with the snakes’.
These three destinies converge at a single moment – perhaps 11 September – when ‘the world began to believe in its own end and [when] together we set off into the shadows’.