The Great Journey

Reda grew up in the south of France and considers himself from there. His father speaks only Arabic, and asks his son for the one thing he wants most: to be driven to Mecca. Reda gets behind the wheel with no enthusiasm at all. The route runs through Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria and Jordan, and along it the two of them meet each other again from scratch. Ismaël Ferroukhi's first film keeps well clear of the return-to-the-homeland cliché: what matters is not the destination but the long silences inside the car. It was the first fiction feature permitted to shoot in Mecca during the Hajj, and it won the first-feature prize at Venice. Nicolas Cazalé and Mohamed Majd play it across from each other.