In a little cove near Marseille, at the height of winter, Angèle, Joseph and Armand return to their elderly father’s home. Angèle is an actress living in Paris and Joseph has just fallen in love with a girl half his age. Armand is the only one who had stayed behind in Marseille to run his father’s small restaurant. It’s time for them to weigh up what they have inherited of their patriarch’s ideals and the community spirit he created in this magical place around a restaurant for workers. But the arrival of a group of boat people will change their reflections…
Throughout his career Robert Guédiguian has expressed his political commitment in his cinema, narrating the life of the working classes, mainly in his native Marseille. Among his most outstanding films are Marius et Jeannette (Marius and Jeannette, 1997), winner of three Césars, La ville est tranquille (The Town is Quiet, 2001) and Le promeneur du Champ de Mars (The Last Mitterand, 2005). In 1998 he won the Special Jury Prize for À la place du Coeur (Where the Heart Is) in San Sebastian, to which he returned in 2004 with Mon père est ingenieur (My Father is an Engineer).