Inside a cité

Produced by Bellota Films


Mirail is a typical French  ‘cité’. A cité is a suburban neighbourhood, which was built in the 60’s in order to shelter the foreign workers and their families, often coming from Arabic countries.

Over the decades, the word has become synonym of petty crimes, riots, extremism, and unemployment, and gained a hint of extremism.

Here, the director has access to different generations of cité-dwellers. He has gained their trust and had them talk freely about their daily life, their beliefs and expectations in relation to the outside world.

They are Mafoud, who can’t read nor write but he is determined to fix it ; Khada, who owns the only sandwich kiosk in the cité and knows all the residents. There are Meriem who is about to leave the Mirail to study psychology at university, and Yamann ,a clothing shop assistant who is strongly religious…

Through their testimony, the program tackles an array of social and political current issues. And it explores some facets of the feelings of abandon and prejudice that reign inside Mirail, « the ghetto » as someone of its inhabitants even call it.